Typography: Mimesis, Philosophy, Politics (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Typography MIMESIS, PHILOSOPHY, POLITICS

PHILIPPE LACQUE- LABARTHE With an lntroduaion by Jacques Derrida

EDITED BY CHRISTOPHER FYNSK LINDA M. BROOKS, EDITORIAL CONSULTANT

HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE~

MASSACHUSETTS

LONDON, ENGLAND

1989

9004030

Copyright ~ 1989 by the: Presldc:nt and Fe:llows of Harvard (".allege All raghts reserved Pranted m the Unated Stares of America 10

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Publication of thIS book has been aided by a grant from the: Andrew W. Mellon Foundanon

BlbhographlC infonnation on the essays appc:ant III dlC "Note: on SOUrce-II," ThIS book IS printed on acid-free paper, and Its btndmg matt.Tlals have: becn chosc:n for srrength and durability, l..I",."" of Conpess Clltnlqging-;II-Pllblialtrtm DatB

Lacouc-Labarthe, Phihppe. (Essays. Englil.h Selections I Typography: mimcslS, philosophy, pohnc!!/ Philippe LacoucLabarrhe; with an introduction by Jacques Dc:rrida; edited by Christopher fynsk p. em. Bibliography. p. Includes indc).. Contents: T~'pography-The cc:ho of the '1ubJcct-The caesura of the sJXCulativc-H61dcrlin and the Gn.'C!c.s-DiderorTraJ1S(cndencc ends In politics. ISBN 0-67+-91700-6 (alk. pa~'f) I. Philosophy. l. Literature-Philosophy. 3. Deconstruction. + HoJderlin, Friedrich, 171O-18+~. ~. Didcror, DeniS, 1713-178+ 6. Political SClCnl'C. I. Fyn~k, Christopher, 19SZII. Title.

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Editors Preface

Eugenio Donato left no projected table of contents for the collection or collections of essays by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe that he hoped to publish in translation. In Lacoue-Labarthe's own recollection, it is clear that Donato originally planned to make "Typography" the centerpiece of a first volume, and considered joining to it "The Echo of the Subject" and Lacoue-Labarthe's essays on Holderlin and Diderot. Since Donato also commissioned a number of other translations of essays by Lacouc-Labarthe, it is possible that his final project would have taken a difterent form altogether. I But I have followed the initial plans in establishing the present volume (adding only "Transcendence Ends in Politics") because they have struck me as following most appropriately from the guiding principle that "Typography" should provide the basis for an initial presentation in English of Lacoue-Labarthe's work. "Typography" was by no means Lacoue-Labarthe's first significant philosophical publication. It was preceded by "La Fable," "Lc Detour," "Nietzsche apocryphe," and "L'Obliteration" (essays collected in Le sujet de La philosophie),2 as well as by the book on Lacan written with Jean-Luc Nancy, Le titre de La lettre. 3 But as Lacoue-Labarthe explains in his "Avertissement" to Le sujet de la philosophie (subtided Typographies I and anticipating in this way T..'YP18raphies 11, which was published in The remalmng tran~lanon~ will appcar an a volume to be: published bv the Umvcrof Mmnesota Prc!ltS ~. Le slijet de III plJi/QsoplJie (Pari~: Aublcr-Flammarioll. 1979). 3 l~e tim de Is Itttre (Paris' Galilee, 19i~). I

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Editor's Preface

with the principal title LJimitatWn des modcrnes) .. 4 "Typography" gathers and refornlulato the questions broached in the previous essays-questions ttlnling essentially upon the problem of the rclation between philosophy and literature as it appears in and between the texts of Nietz5mcthing bke the ~rcal,' even if it be consigned to impossibility. This, of Course, will not be without in COI1.'1equenccs-even If the theon:ticlll flli/llre is cerrain" (p. 153). Wc will see that the subjcct Reik cnm. by Jubm,tt"'B to that to which frcud s"hm,n and to which Lacan sul"",ts (this is what "will not be without Its conscquenccs")-an ineluctable chain of the samc submission, dlC same failure. A singular "rivalry" in mourning (p. 157). "[Everythmgl that can and should hold our ancntion m RClk, everything in his work that makc.'S it morc than a simple repetition of Freud-that IS to say, Its (thettreti&td fllilure' ..• Reik's theoretJcRl fllr/llre. or ratha, worlung through hi"" the geneml fllilun of the thttwetJenf' (p. 163). Thc latter consists in reflecting Freud in the ~pctitlon of the Gocthean motif of «repeated reflection" (D7lederhtJlte Sp,eBel~mg), a s("-'Cular reduction of the caracousric. "He was seeking, an shon, to define a kmd of 'musical' essence of the subjca. Nevertheless, he was not unawa~ of the fact that to mlnntt to the theoretical was to lose all chance of rcachang hIS goal. This IS why d,e theoretical 'failure' is also a 'SllCCC:SSs and the rnhilntum wiD never be truly litkd~ (p. 167). "nlC double mhibitron at work her(: both theoreticaL, by sulmJJssilJII, and also literary, artistic" (p. 173). "We must start again, here, from Retk's theoretical failure, or rath&::r from hiS theoretical IJ"RJllIJirt, since 'mhlbitioll' certainly has something to do with it. Why does he get bogged down?" (p. 176). "11U5 is not only why hiS theory of autobiography is Bbortive, but also why the autobiography Itself cannot be written" (p. 179). I emphasized abort because this won! says something more an regard to the event of a singular fatlurc: a birth, rather than an origin, takes p1ac&:: Without taking plac.e, a nameable subject will have been c:arraed which is stillborn or "comes to itself only to lose itself" All of thiS is also carried In the "'Maternal Closure'" upon which the final pages open. But 1 also emphasized thiS won! because it belongs to the title of a book announced by lacoue-I..abarthe (L'tn7f1Ytem&nt de III/ittirdtltre).1 would have cm.')hasi7. t:d tC)f the same reasons the word exemplmrty, another announced mlc, another major motif of this thought. [cxtend mv llldex (an introductory essay is a somewhat garrulous Index whcn It IS not an irremediable betrayal): "'We are on the verge of the secund theoretical jlOlmdenng • . . nlC narrative recounting this second failure warrants our pausing f()I' a moment" (p. 180). What the tc:nn "'fI()W1dcrmg" [m/lSemmt-also translated above as U quagmlrc"J adc.i~ to the tc.:rOt "failure" and then to "aboruon" is perhaps the Image: of a slow sinking uno a terrain whose limits arc not di.'1tim.:r, whosc sites cannot be 5(,"[ all agalllst one anorher, whose ground L~ nor lIolid. Thl~ hall to do with the SU'liLturc of a limit without OppclSltl()ll. And the lol()wnc.~!t ha... ro do with repentlon, With the compulSion to repeat: one doe'i not ac.tvanc:c. one advance..; in place. one repeats the f.1i1ure-thc mhibition, rather thall p.lraly.dng, ()bllge!. one: to make the same gc.o;tllrl\ and cadI movement c.':luses one: to ..ink further Thinp do not h,ll')pen jU'it OIU:C. in running up agaanst a

1ntroduaion: Desistance

39

model'" (p. lOS). That is to say, the optical, theatrical, theoretical, and Oedipal model that forces Reik's relapse and the repeated tailure, the "theoretical failure" which is nothing other than dle failure in theory, clnd because of theory-the tailure to theori7"c this very thing which as experienced in thought cannot be dleorized, and which is'-rhythm, even more than nlusic. This latter experiellce docs not go beyond theory in the direction of some occult region where affect would have to be put before knowledge. On the contrary, it makes it possible to think the law of the theoretical-as such. Lacoue-Labarthe analyzes patiently,. with a kind of rigorous conlpassion, the renlm of this law in Reik's text, in its theoretic-autoanalyric adventure. He recognizes in it all its daring moves, the "suspicions"26 about Freud, the intinlations of what he uinvites us to think" without thinking it himself-namely the closure in which remains, and will remain, a psychoanalysis still too limit, as the simple word "failure" might lead us [0 think. And above all. what produces and aggravates the floundering, namely this situation in which the effort to get Ollt by hftmg oneself up only mires one further, IS that the repetition grows heavier, takes on the autObiographic or autoanalytic ""rrntive, as lucid as it is Impotent, of the flounder109 itself Relk is the first to recount, in repeating ir, the "mirial and repeated nnstake": "The tailure of my attempt did not teach me a lesson in this dll'Cction" (p. ISo). '~I must admit to myself that I ha\'~ failed again because I have been toO ambitious" (p. 189). I..acoue- Labarthe: "It is, in faa, to mlnnlt purely and Simply to the Freudian programming. Noncrhdcss~ it is nor quite so simpk eidler (p. 181). And here, fom13I17..ed in the most economical fashion possible, the scene of a resistllllft to desUtllntt, tile scene oftWis· llIlIce: "But it happens that In Rcik's own text-on one Ol.'Casion-thcse three fJlltStums ar~ asse'hbltd together [how about that-there it is again I Perhaps WldlOUt his knowing It (though I'm not so sure), and 10 any ca~ without result. AI, though It w~re already too Intet and as though the thetWetlClll sulnmss,un to J.·relld prevcnted RClk from lettwg lID to the point of rcnoWlcing the renunciation-a renUI1C1ation which, despite everydling, determines his &agile narcissilttic' rtcOJ'£ry [(re)-snisit'] an the demand for paternal nmstII"c& (whereby rheory, here Oedipus. triumphs twice over)" (p. 190). And the "too late'" I~ stiD resonating. us. The word "sultplcion" itself. a "'suspiclon .. _ hastily covered over," bears more strictly on the possibiliry of thinking rhythm ;t1el[. "bctore" musk, alm()$[ without It. lh: word returns several tlm~ (PP_ 2.OJ-2.0+) 10 one of the striking passagt:~ on the ~h()tar, whose: three groups of notes, as Rcik lIpc(ific:s, "[arc) distinguished only by a change of rhythm" (p lO4). The lthofar, RClk had remarked, 15 not a musical instrumcnt~ the sound it producc.'S "'is more like the bellowing of a bull rhan music" (p 204), and the Jcwlsh tradition docs not annburc rhe mvcntion of nlU4lIC to a gift from God. But beyond the: word, Relk ~uspects Freud-this time accusing rather than expressIng an intimation-of having Insisted "one-Sidedly lon I the dctemlmmg role of the tcu" (p. 182) and ofha\'lng In gc:ncral"ncglec:ted" the tac:tor of the nluslul exprcMloll of a cerrain cm(xion m the nme" (p 186)

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Introduction: DesistlUzce

Greek, in any case toO Platonic (onto-typological, onto-eidetic, mimetological, etc.),27 and into which he talls back, submitting hinlSClfto it. He subjects himself. The movement by which he institutes himself as a subject, in the course of an analytic autobiography "haunted" by the return of music and rhythm, is also the Illovement by which he subjects himself to the law represented by Freud. He subjects hiJnself out of defense, inhibition,28 resistance bek>re the very thing that engages his thinking and in which he engages our thought: a certain desistance of the subject in the experience of the double bind and its rhythmic (de)constitution. He cannot not avoid the unavoidable. He resists desistance, consolidates his subjectity ill this subjection, this very failure, in this renunciation, of which, as several signs manifest clearly, he was well aware. One might say that in surrendering to this resistance, he had to abdicate before the responsibility of thinking, of thinking that with which he engages our thought. He, Reik, desisted before the task that seemed incumbent upon him: to think ineluctable desistance. This is not a moral offense, of course, but how is it possible? Read "The Echo of the Subject." In a labyrinth which I will not try to reconstitute, and which no commentary could "double" (for its course is unique, and all along it a logic of resonance substitutes itself for that of the nlirror: Echo undoes Narcissus, transfonning in this way the whole space of this logic, its whole tenlporality), I will propose merely a supplementary thread. Not in order to dramatize a reading that has strictly no need of it, or in order to play at Ariadne. But in order to approach somewhat the signanll'e of Lacoue-Labarthe when he says "[" (in quotation marks, here and there throughout his work), when he speaks of madness, of style, of autobiography or allobiography, of death or of music, of Reik-or of an other, for he who is named Reik in this text is 27. ThJ!l would be the place for a patient c).aminatlon: too Greek or too "Platonic"? Can one: connect what III it pre-"Plaronic" or pre-"philosophical" Grcc,c: would not yer be onto-typologICal or millletOlogicai with the JudaiC vem toward which the experience ofthc sholar poanrs? One should fOllow. in Lacouc-Labarthe's work, and more precisely 111 tlus context. at the very heart of ps),choanalysls. the debate between dIe Greek. the German, and the lew. It resonates everywhere. Can one say of the: Jew or the German what IS said of the Greek in "Holderhn and the Greeks": ('The Greeks' proper IS iIJi"lItabie be'llust it "tve?' took plnu" (p. 2+6)? 28. TIle resistance to deslstancc takes the form of inhibition-its general form. which no longer represents a clinical category or the definition of a "pamologlcar' symptom. Inhibition is 11IIIlJlmdRblt In general. No rhythm without It. One 1.ClJ1 say the same of dIe double band Sec on thl!. poant the pagC!s already cited, In particular pp. 167 and 17~

Introduaiotl: Desistance

41

also anyone who has linked, at the cdge of madness (what is that exactly, thc edge-tile bord?), the autobiographical adventure, and his doubles, and the other, and death, to the musical obsession (Rousseau, Nietzsche), to the concern with rhythm (Holderlin, Mallarmc, Nietzsche again). Reik, and all of tllcm-tllcse are Lacoue-Labarthc, you'll say, rushing to identify the identifications; and if that's tile case, I wish you luck if somc day you hope to call a halt to it in this genealogical chain. But 110, Lacoue-Labarthe could not read Reik as he did except insofar as he broke the idt-ntificatioll'l or knew how to tollow him while always removing the barriers to which the other's resistance was clinging. And each time he removes one of these limits, he explains its source and its mechanism, and then its ineluctable renun. In this gesture, and by tllis rhythm-you'll be able to verify this-LacoueLabarthe is at every instant as close and as far from Reik as he could possibly be. And he tells you everything you need in order to think the law of this paradox. He even has a name for the law of the paradox: it is the hyperboltJgic.29 IYJPerbolqgie is exprC$Sly defined in "Diderot: Paradox and Mime!lis" (for example, p. zoo) and in ''The Caesura of me Spcculanve" (tor cxampk, p. 2.J~). It programs the mevitable efti-cts of a "logic" of mimesis. In this precise conrext, where the 2.9 ThiS

question COncerns the actor. this hypcrbologic regularly conVt."I'ts dlC gift of e\'Crythmg into the gift of nothang, and this latter into the gift of the thing itself. "The gift of Impropriety"-in other words, me "gift of mmlCSlS"-is the "gift of genelid appropnatlon and of presentation" (p. 160). But this is not~ as we sec, a "conte."(t" or an "example" among others. It IS a matter of ::appropriation an,1 (de-)propnation in general. The pia)' of the de-, on which I have bc!cn working since the beginning of tillS essay, might well belong to mis hyperbologlc. Without beang negative, or bemg subject to a dlakc.:tic.. it both organizes and disorganizes what It appears to determine; it belongs to and yet escapes the order of its own senes What I said m ~taning out about desisran(e would hoki cquall}' well for the hypcrbologlc of dlSJIIstRllRtroll ("'fypography,~ pp. 120 and IH). (de)unlstitlltJOII (CcL'Obliteration/' "Typogrnphy," pp. 2.~9 and 2.60; "The f..('ho of the Subjc..'cr," p. 174), dlSRrtlttllRtrtm ("Thc Caesura of the Speculative," p :!.~+, "Holderhn and the Greeks," p. 1+S), dlSappropnRti01I l (dt)propnRtron] ("Typogrnphy." pp. 133 aIld 135; "Dlderot: Paradox and Mimesis," p. 265; "The Caesura of the Spl"Culativc." p 2.:U; "Holdt-Tlin and the Grec~" p. 24~), and deconrh'JlClioll ("'Typography," pp. 6~ and 12.~; "The Echo of the Subject," p 1+1; '7he Caesura of the Speculative," pp . .312, 2~). Taking into .lCCOunt the supplement::ary ring of which I have .. poken, the: mew,ung ()f"dcconstnlct"-a word which Lacouc-Labarthc ~a}'s elsewhere be docs l10t conSider "in the least 'worn out'" {I..'imitRtum des ,HlJfIernes. p.282)-bcars 'i()n1Cti",e~ the sense of a task. somctmles that of an cvc:nt, of what (lCcurS an any case In a "practl,-aJ" ~ituatJon, tor example of libldcrlin (d: "The Caesura of the Speculative," p 2.2.1) I h.lve remarkc:d that Lacouc-Labarthe: somcrinlcs writes U(de)COIlStrtl&tion II (''Typography,'' p IZ~).

I ntroductiol'l: Desistance

At this monlent, when I have to cut things short, too late or too early, I'll take up only one example: the ClUsura. There is no rhythnl without caesura. And yt:t, as Holderlin reminds us, the caesura "itself" must be "antirhythmic" (p. 234), even arrythl11ic. This interruption does not have the dialectical cadence of a relation between rhythm and nonrhythm, the continuous and the discontinuolls, etc. It interrupts alternation, "the constraint of opposition in general" (p. 2[2), dialectic and the speculative, even the double bind (pp. 236ff.) when it retains an oppositional form. It is ineluctable-and it does not spare avoidance: It prevents [Witer] (a protective gesture, which docs not necessarily mean a "riulalistic" one) the racing oscillation, pa.nic, and an orientation toward this or that pole. It represents the active neutrality of the interval between [entre-deux]. TIlis is undoubtedly why it is not by chance that the caesura is, on each occasion, the empty moment-the absence of "momenr"-ofTircsias's intervention: that is to say, of the intrusion of the prophetic word. ("The Caesura of the Speculative," p. 2.35)

When in Sophoclean tragedy it marks the withdrawal of the divine and the tunling back of man toward the earth, the caesura, gap or hiatus, plays at and Wldoes mourning. A Trauerrpiel plays at mourning. It doubles the work of mourning: the speculative, dialectic, opposition, identification, nostalgic interiorization, even the double bind of imitation. But it doesn't avoid it. Gap or hiatus: the open nlouth. To give and receive. The caesura sometimes takes your breath away. When luck is with it, it's to let you speak. Jacques Derrida

I

Typography

Almost everywhere it was madness which prepared the way for the new idea, which broke the spell of a venerated usage and superstition. Do you understand why it had to be madness which did this? Something in voice and bearing as uncanny and incalculable as the demonic moods of the weather and the sea and therefore worthy of a similar awe and observation? Something that bore so visibly the sign of total unfreedom as the convulsions and froth of the epileptic, which seemed to mark the madman as the mask and speaking-trwnpet of a divinity? Something that awoke in the bearer of a new idea himself reverence for and dread of himself and no longer pangs of conscience and drove him to become the prophet and martyr of his idea?-while it is constantly suggested to us today that, instead of a grain of salt, a grain of the spice of madness is joined to genius. all earlier people found it much more likely that wherever there is madness there is also a grain of genius and wIsdom-something "divine," as one whispered to oneself. Or rather: as one said aloud forcefully enough. "It i.~ through madness that the greatest good things have come to Greece," Plato said, in concert with all ancient mankind.

HaJ1C JfIJ' not obsened that imitations, if co1ltinuedfrom :Yfmth far ,nto life, settle doJl'" into habits and second natllYe i" the body, the speech, and the thought? US, i,uieed, said he. m· lvill not then allow our charges, Jphom Jlle expect to jWOJ1egood mel', bei,'B me'l, to play the parts ofJJ7OmeJl and imitate a )17(I111"n young or old wrallgling nJitll her husband, defying iJeaven, loudly boasting, fortunate i7' !Jer on", '07"Clt, or mVO/J1cd i" misfortune and possessed by griif a"d lameJ2tation-rtilllm a lvoman tllat is sick, i" 10Jle, or In labor. Most ~ainly not, he replied. Nor "lay they i,nttate .~laJJt:s, female ami male, do"'D the offices of slaves. No, Hot that e'tiler Nor yet, as it seems, bad metl JI1"O arc COR1fIrds a71d JlJho do the opposr,te of the thi,'!Is JJ1e i'lst nOll' spoke oj: ,-evili,'B and lampooning 011e 11IlOther, speaki'll9 foul lW1rds in their ""PI or Ji,hm sober and In other 1V~1S smni"B agamst thnnse/JJCS a71d

44

Typography

others in word lind deed rifter tile fmlnon of such men. And I take it they must not form the habit oflikelling themsdves to madmen eitiJer in JI'ords nor yet ,n deeds. For wile kHIIJI71etlge they must h"J7e both ofmall RIUl bRd men Rnd J11Omen, they must do and imitate nothi,'8 oftl,u kind. Most fme, he said. Well, thetz, neighing JJorses and lou>ing b,d/s, and tlJe ,wise ofnM'S a7,d the roar of the sell and the thunder a,ui everything ofthat kind-Jl1ill they i",itate these? NRY, they hRI" been forbidden, he said, to be mad or to liketl themsell'es to nurdmen.

Let us go a step further: all superior men who were irresistibly drawn to throw off the yoke of any kind of morality and to frame new laws had., if they lI'eTe not actutrlly nllUi, no alternative but to make themselves or prcrcnd to be mad ... "How can one make oneself mad when one is not mad and docs not dare to appear so?"-almost all the significant men of ancient civilisation have pursued this train of thought ... Who would venture to take a look into the wilderness of the bitterest and most superfluous agonies of soul.. in which probably the most fruitful men of all times have languished! To listen to the sighs of these solitary and agitated minds; c'Ah, give me madness., you heavenly powers! Madness., that I may at last believe in myself! Give deliriums and convulsions, sudden lights and darkness, terrify me with frost and fire such as no monal has ever felt, with deafening din and prowling figures, make me howl and whine and crawl like a beast: so that I may only come to believe in mysclfl I am consumed by doubt, I have killed the law, the law anguishes me as a corpse does a living man: if 1 am not more than the law I am the vilest of all mell. Thc new spirit which is in mc, whence is it if it is not from you? Prove to me that I am yours; madness alone can prove it." Nietzsche, DlIJbreak. and Plato, Republic*

In the long run, the question posed here is that of "philosophical madness." What can be said, for example, about Rousseau's madne.~s-or Nietzsche's? Indeed, what about Hegel (who "believed he was going mad") or even Kant? Or Comte? Or probably others still, even if they have not passed as mad, or if it is not entirely customary for us to consider thenl fully as "philosophers"? .. EPWmpll: The.: first and duro sc(tlon~ arc from Friedrich NlcrJ..schc. Dn.vbrtaL·, no. 14 ("'The Significanlc of Madness 111 the IIt'ltory of Morality"), trails. R J Hollingd:lIc (C.'lIubndgc: Cambridge Umverslty Pre~. 1981). pp. 14-16. 'rhe sc.oond 5c.-aion is from Platds Rtpl,bli, (III, ~9~d-~96h), trans. Paul Shorey, 111 The Collected DiaJo..lJlleJ, ,,-d. F..dith Hamtlton and lIuntlllgtOIl Calms (Princ~tolr Prmccton Umvcnlty Press, 1961) A1I5ubsc(.)uenr citations ufPlato in this essay arc from this "olwne

Typography

4S

To begin to fonnulate our question, then, provisionally, and still from a distance, we ask: What can be said about madness when it touches (on) philosophy? When it seizes a philosopher or when a philosopher lets himself be taken by it, when he lets himself succumb to it, fall into it-go under? Is this an "accident" or the effect of a necessity, of a "destiny"? Is it to be wtderstood "empirically" (in whatever form: psychological, historical, sociological, and so on) or must one go in search of its cause-that is to say, its reason-within philosophy itself? And in either case, what is involved? The same thing, the sanle concept of madness? Is it possible to decide? Is it possible, for example, that there is some philosophical predestillation to madness, some philosophical predetermination of madness, evidence of which might be found ill the tact that it should be more toward its end (or what it thinks as such) that philosophy, pushed to its limit, exhausted, Wlsetded, exasperated, was forced to undergo such a trial? And what would be the value of this kind of hypothesis? What would it involve, above all, in relation to philosophy? These are classic questions, now classical-accepted. Which docs not mean that they arc tor this reason pertinent. Far from it. But it is nevertheless indispensable that we hold on to them-that we not rush to overturn them and imagine that, by simply deciding to, one can change questions. In fact, there is even some likelihood, some chance, that the "thing itself" depends on it. Perhaps, after all, nladness itself ~prings from certain questions, and even-why not?-from some of these questions (from the presupposed, for example, of some of these qucstions) . TIlls is the reason for our asking, in short (indeed, it is hard to see how we could do anything else): how can we read,for example, how can we place or situate, how can we "recognizc" (we arc not saying ~illterpret") the opening lines of Rousseau's Confessions ("I fashion an enterprise which has no previous example . . .") or Dialogues? Or Kant's last texts? Or Schopenhauer-and not only the "last" Schopenhauer? Or Nietzsche's writings-all of Nietzsche's writings from the year 18S8? What should we do, for example, with Ecce Homo? or even with just Ecce Homo's prologue? And with rhLc;,for example, within the prologue? Seeing that before long I must confront humanity with the most difficult ,iemand ever made of i4 it ~ccm:o, indispensable to me to say lvho I am Really, one should know it, for 1 have not left myself "wlthollt testi-

Typography mony." But the disproportion between the grcamess of my task and the smaJlness of my contemporaries has tound expression in the fact that one has neither heard nor even seen me. I live on my own credit; it is perhaps a mere prejudice that I live ... Under thl"Se circumstance~ I have a duty against which my habits. even more the pnc.ic of my l11~tillcts~ revolt at bottom-namely, to say: HeRr me! For 1 tun stich and stich a penon. AbO,Je RlJ, do not mistake me for someone else! ... I am, for example, by no means a bogey, or.l moralistic monster-I am acrually the very opposite of the type of man who so far has been revered as virruous. Between ourselves, it seems to me that precisely this is pan of my pride. I am a disciple of the philosopher Dionysus; I should prefer to be even a satyr to being a saint ... Among my writings my Zamthustra stands to my mind by irsclf. With that I have given mankind the greatest present that has ever been made to it so far. This book, with a voice bridging cenruries, is not only the high~ est book there is, the book that is truly characterized by the air of the heights-the whole fact of man ltes beneath it at a tremendous distanceit is also the deepest, born out of the innermost wealth oftruth ... Here no "prophet" is speaking, none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power whom people caU founders of religions. Above aU, one must heRr anght the tone that ConlCS from this mouth ... Such things reach only the most select. It is a privilege without equal to be a listener here. Nobody is free to have ears for Zarathustra ... Not only docs he speak differently, he also is different. . . Now I go alone, my disciples. You, too, go now, alone. Thus I want it ... One repays a teacher badly if one always rcmallls nothing but a PUpil. And why do you not want to pluck at my wrcadl? You revere me; but what if your reverence t"mbles one day? Beware lest a starue slay you! ... Now I bid you lose me and find yourselves; and only JJ'/Jn, you I,ave all denied ttlC will I return to vou.' ,

What should we do with this? What arc we to nlake of it if we refuse to think-of course-that there could be only pure incoherence or illSallity ill these lines, but also when we have some reason to be sllSpicious of all the '4demagogic," if not upsychagogic," phraseology with which Olle clainls todo\y~with­ out, it is true, too great a risk-to speak in the nruue of madness? What arc we to nIake of it if.. for example, (fasclllated) fear and incOillprehenslon are indlssociably at play there? , Fncdr,c:h Nletzsche, E(m Homo, 111 Bast" W"'h'~ t?/·N,audJe. tram Walter K.lufmann (New York' Random Hou5C. J968). pp 67~-676.

Typography

47

We a re proposing a task that is obviously inmlCl1"e-CVen should we attempt, nO doubt in vain, to reduce it to a "reading" of Nietzschean~~. in all likelihood, in~~~!1~!t!lle. We wiD be content, therefore, to explore dIe terrain. Not in oroer to mark it out, to circumscribe or describe it, to survey it, or to go around it in advance-ill the now donlinant style of the proprietor (whose desire to "construct," a.1i we know, can hardly be dissinullated); for there is ~othing "he~e" that can be delimited or can serve as ground(s)-a fortiori th~t Q~e could appropriate. Instead, we wiD explore the terrain merely to go into it a bit, to clear approaches, to begin, at most, to break a path: to see what it leads to, what happens (where we find ourselves, if we find where we're going . . .). An essay, let's say. And without deceiving ourselves too much, without forgetting that we will certainly have to begin again, in a different way, (at least) another time, by other means, following diflcrent approaches, and so on-it should become evident that this goes without saying.

Onto-typo-logy Wanting to be what we arc not, we come to believe ourselves something other titan what we arc, alld this is how we become mad. -Rou~eau,

Preface to La nouveUe

Heloise

TIns is why 1 (~'r') will start fronl a precise point. And perhaps since we have just had a sample of it, a certain "doublingn of Nietzsche. That is, in order to limit the field of investigation (aJld in order not to have to go back too far), I will start fronl a certain relationship, WOven explicitly, in Ecu Homo, by the author of the text (he who says "I," &igns with his nanle, presents and exposes Jnmself, recounts his life and work, retraces his origins, claims his absolute originality, conlplains of not being recognized for what he is, judges hinlSelf inconunensur«thle with anyone else, and so on) with "Zarathustra"-the text so elltitled, of course, but aLCio "Zarathustra himself, as type" (if not simply Zarathl4strahimseJf)-whosc '~tory," he (the author) makes it his duty to "tell" (the genesis, therefore, a"d the constrllctlon, and the encollnter), wholn he is bent on distinguishing from an}' otller figure we might think of as analogous (here agam, it should not be a matter of

Typography "confusion"), whonl he constantly cites in support of his "own" statements, or behind whom he constantly takes cover (whom h
Typography

49

expecting It. We can at least suspect that he was neither altogether innocent nor altogt~hcr ignorant m the mattcr. l Moreover" it is probable that Rohde himsclfknew" in one way or another, that he had a chance of hitting upon sonlcthing. As proof, we have the response that Nietzsche made two months later, that is to say, the silence or "'denegation" that he opposed to Rohde-who in this instance was styled a homo litemtus: "My Zarathustra is finished in its three acts. It is a sort of abyss of the future-something to nlakc one shudder, especially the joy in it-Everything in it is my OWIl, without model, comparison, or precursor [Es ist alles dnn mein Eigen, ohne Vorbild, Vergleith, Vorganger]; a person who has once lived ill it will return to the world with a different face." 1 Compare, for example, In addition to the.: courses devoted to Plam, the lectUres of 1874-1876 on the hiStory of Greek hterarore, where Nietzsche, ranking highest the "great art" of "the writer Plato" (reversing, in this way~ some of his previous propositlon~, such as dlose of the: Bin/) ofTrttgttf.y), also explicitly mentions the existence of a type of dialogue-in the tradition of so/mum logol inaugurated, according to Aristotle, by Plato-called mllJl'/tos. The fonn, he observes, is one that Aristotle himself, among others, supposedly engaged in (thiS is '" faCt what Diogenes Qta tells 115) and In which it was customary to represent Socrates meeting with an Orient.u "Ill~i," principally Zoroaster. Allow me to refer here to my own "La Dissimulation" (in" Nletzscl1t "'~Jourd'IIU;. vol. 2. [Paris: Union Gcn~ralc d'Edirions, 197J], pp.9-36). ~ Letter of February 22., 1884. It ill cenamly not insignificant that this lettcr begins by turning round the motif of solirode and that of lost friendship: "'In reading your last letter•... it was as if you pressed n1)' hand and looked at mc sadl)'-sadJy, as if you Wanted to say: 'How IS it possible mat we have so little in common and live as in differell[ worlds! And yet once-.' And that IS how it is, friend, With all the lX'Ople I love: everydlillg is over, it is the past, forlx."arancc; we: still meet, we talk, so as not to be silent; we still exchange letters, so as not to be silent. But the look in the eyes tdls the truth: and this look tells me (I hear it often enough!), 'Fricn~ NietzsChe, you are completely .1lone now!'" Similarly, It IS not Inslgmficam that again in the same letter, after having rejected the Idea of a resemblance or a kinship between Zarathustra and anyone whomsoever (if not with himself-and, a'i we know. he: will also speak of Zarathmtr.l. or of ZlIrlltlnlStm. as his "child"), NictzSChe Immediately movt."S to an apology for hiS own style that preti~rclt. almost laterally, his "last d~"Claratlons.n especially those of £'''0 Homo: "'But I mUst n 57

the relation between dialectic and DllTStellung. The question of DarstellU11(l, here, must give way-and finally in a strange nlanner. For it is precisely what is involved, though between the lines, when Hcideggcr's analysis as a whole doses infallibly upon the reterral of Junger to Hegel-and of Hegel to the Greeks: In order to be able to dehne.ue more clearly the relations which carry rhe connection between ~ork» and "pain.." nothing less would be necessary than to think through the fundamental trait of Hegel's metaphysics, rhe uniting unity of the Phenomenology of Spirit and of the Science of Logic. The fundamental trait is (~absolure negativity" as the (\in1inite force" or reality, that is, of the "existing concept." In the same (but nOt rhe identical) belonging to the negation of the negation, work and pain manifest their inncmlost metaphysical relationship. This reference already suffices to indicate what extensive discussions [E1iIrterungen] would be necessary here in order to do justice to the matter. If anyone indeed dared to think through the relationship between "work" as the fundamental trait of being and "p~" moving back past Hegel's Logic, then the Greek word for pain, namely a{gos would first come into speech for us. Presumably, RIgas is related to Rle.go which, as an intensive of lego signifies intimate gathering. Then pail' would be what gathers in the most intimate. HcgePs concept of the "concept" and its properly understood "strain" say the same thing on the transformed terrain of the absolute metaphysics of subja:tivity.l6

Taking into consideration the Cartesian "reversal," and then Hegel, the fundamentally Greek (and Platonic) origin of onto-typo-Iogy is indisputable. But where docs all of this lead us? As f~r as possible, we might suspect, trom Rohde's sllspicion about the origin or model of Zarathustra. That IS to say, in fact, to the sug_iestioD tbat the .t on the ~a\'C-a "mytlucal" character that ~ ncvcrth~­ less suspec,:t to HCKkggc.:r, If We mol)' u:l\" un the quotation m.lrb that nCl'er f."\iJ to Cllclose hj~ usc of rhe worU "Gldchniss"-put Into qUC~ti()l1, U1 an~' way whatlloc\'(.T,

79

pMes the interpretation of truth as Rlethe,a-Unverstelltheit. We must understand this if we wish to grasp the relation of art (mimesis) and truth in Plato's conception correctly, which is to say, in a Greek manner. Only in such a realm do Plato's questions unfold From it derives the possibility of receiving answers.~55 Even inconlplctely translated, the matter is clear. And, as is glaringly obvious., it is exactly here that the loss of DarsteOung comes to be inscribed. Aletheia, a certain determination of aletheiR, obscures Darstellung. Scarcely having entered the scene.. painfully hoisted onto the stage, the pedestal (GesteU) barely installed, then .. Mimesis literally falls aw~ [ditale]. It drops, it takes a (bad) fall, or, in Greek, it dedines-to find itself at once in bed (kline), that is, in the "clinic" of Book X. How does all of this happen? Everything here rests upon the translation, surprising in fact, and rare (if not unique), that Heidegger proposes for aktheia: UnversteUt.. heit. We expected the "veil," "covering over," ''withdrawal,'' "forgetting," "obscuring"-we could expect anything, and yet it is the stele that wins out. Ofcourse, Unverstelltheit, in its most banal sense, "means" non-dissimulation and can pass for as good an equivalent of Unverborgenheit, for example, as any other term. Moreover, it is in this sense that one must first understand it, since, a few lines earlier.. Um1errtelltheit is coupled with Offenheit ("being open"), which like Offenbarung ("disclosure") is one of the master words of the "ontological" vocabulary., and because everywhere else, aletheia is UnJ1trborgenheit. Unverstelltheit, then, designates "unveiling," "dis-occultation." But it docs not translate aletheia. If it translates anything (or can., above all, even be translated)., it would be rather non-displacement, remaining-standing, or tlOt-folling, non-instability. 56 In fact., by playing on certain possibilities in French (as it happens, though, they arc quite slight), we could venture disenl1fJilement (from renJloiier, enl1Oilage, eJJvoilcment-wherc, by analogy with the cllrve of a sail, the warping of steel being tempered is dcsignated).57 TIlis would have the merit of allowing aletheia to be heclfd, but the inconvenience of leaving the rtele, so to speak, to the oubliettes. As a matter of fact, no possibility is very satisfying, and it is ~5.

Nietzsche, \'01. I, p. 17~ ~6 Bur wc must nor f()rgct m.lt 1'tJTtrllen CUto dISIOSt:ill," "ro di4lplat:c," "to disarrange," "[u mix up," etc.) call also mCilll "to (ounrcrtei[" or "to dlSguiu:" {one's vukc, ()ne'~ gesture", Ol1t"S writing) fl. Th~ trntL4I13t1on h:141 been suggcs[l:d [() me by Mlkkc.:1 Bor In the: directl011 (as Hegel suggests, with some precision, in The History of PI1,/flSophy) of the ComiC writers, and Aristophanes in particular (If only 011 account of the B""qllet and the Apology), or even other less ~noblc" torms of dramatic mimesis, such as nllme. (Sec on this subjl.oct. In addition to Anstotle's PoetICS, the ramOl.~ thcsc& of Eugene Duprccl, and above all Herman Reich'!. Det'MimllS I Berlin' WCldmannschc

Typography

135

this entire pedagogical program, in which the question of mimesis and of fiction is dcbated~ is itself presented as a myth,13i but because in reality Plato-and this is the height of the paradox-does not speak one word of the philosophical disCIJUne itself. Unless this be indirectly-by what play of mirror(s) ?-and insofar as we may consider the redressing and verification of fictive discourse to be regulated by the model of true discourse, in the fonn of the discourse of philosophy. But in the text it is Socrates, "his" mimos, the mimetic part of "himself," who speaks philosophically. The philosopher is here a figure. As for Platothe one named Plato or (who knows?) the one named "Platton" (the Greeks themselves did not miss the Witz)-he fictions, content, perhaps, with playfully re-marking his "own" name or the at least double sense that an (assumed) proper name can always take on. Ifonly by an "astute" pun. As regards an author's dissimulation, the splitting of enunciation, subjective depropriation, etc., we must reco~ that it is difficult to Buchhandiung, 1903], especially Chapter S on the "mimetic clement in Plato" and the relation of Socrates the "ethologue" to the "cthologico-mimcric" art of Plato.) But in fact this is still not the question. Rather, the queshon is one of knowing whether, from the moment when the end explicitly pursued by Plato is the expulsion of mimesis, an~ an particular, of me most overwhelming form of munesis (tragic mimcsls), the strategy slich an end imposes IS the pure and simple repetition of tragedy, or whether, on the contrary, the redoubtable character of mimesis being clearly recognized, the amre operation attempted by Plato docs not consist In takmg the risk of mimi,'i1 mimesis, specularly redoublmg It, with the hope of fU.ing its disconcerting mobility. This would In any case explain the difference-for there is one-between tragedy and philosophy. But also the fact that it is no accident that Plato chose Socrates-a provocative and Voluntary pharmakos (and not solicited and consenting). the first great Incarnation, according to Hegel, of sclf-consciousness-for the protagonist of this /Jllrod.:v, this di,lernon [dttournemmt1 of tragedy (which IS neither a comedy nor a satyric drama) that arc the Sokratikoi logoi, Nor is it an accident that It is to Socrarcs, but never to himself, Plato (even as mterlocUlor-it is, for example, hiS two brothers who answer Socrates in me Relmbli&, ",hil~ as [he PI1fIetiol, tells us, he: himself is never there), that he entruSts the task of marking the jealous proximity of the philosopher to the poets. the secret love that "'he" has for Homer, the pride that IS "'his own" In having renounced poetry. etc The Ica~t we can say IS that a manipulanon of thiS kind IS far from being mnoa:nt and that, If we had to compare It to something, perhaps it would be better to compare it, tinally~ with the art uf the puppett."Cr I'lM1'ItmnettlSte]. the tl1atlmlUopotikos, to whom ~Plato" multiplies alh.JSlollS "4ch time the question of mnnesis is brought up. (Sec, on thi .. poant. Dies, GHll1"ol Ii Arhhles, in Bltlletin de l'AssOClation GlulllU41ne Bulli [19271. no. I#IS).

RepublIC_ 376d. "Come, then, Ju..t as If we were tdhng stones or fables [osper en mutho muthologotmtes1 and had ample leisure to do SO; let us educate thcsc men In 137- Sec

our diSCOUrse."

Typogmphy find anything, already. more explicit. But we have still to understand why this is so. And to understand what could have led a philosopher~ not one of the least important-to engage these questions in such fonnal sophistications or such writing ganles. What has generally been neglected is that if the Platonic "poetics" is essentially grounded, as is that of Aristotle, on an analysis of texts handed down by tradition, it nevertheless.. as nomlative (unlike, perhaps.. Aristotle's), never regulates more than onU discourse. To be nlore precise, if such a "poetics" did not in the last analysis rcter to speech and to the conditions of oral enunciation, there would not be the least chance ofdrawing from it any decision whatsoever or any critical position. For the criterion of dissimulation or substitution is by right inoperative in the case of written enwtciation-and for the simple, elementa.ry reason that an autllor can never be there, in person, in order to guarantee dle identity of the one who wrote "I," of the one who expressed himself in the first "person." It is impossible to authenticate a written text. The identifiea.tUm of a speaker is authorized only in the exercise of living speech-at least insofur as (but this is what Plato wants to believe) the presence of the speaker is visible or perceptible, insofar as it is always possible "theoretically" to rectify the dramatization, or insofur as the speaker (the subject of the utterance) can be made to coincide with the ~'subject" of the enunciation. But in fact nothing, in principle, can ever guarantee such an agreement. A ~subject" never coincides with itself This is why the decision regarding mimesis concenlS and can only concgn theatrical mimesis alone-or whatever we can conceive in temts of this model. But this is also why the decision nelJtr really takes place, and why it can never be made. In any case, nothing can ever be established or shown here [ry averer]. For to reduce what is in question in mimesis-and what is, in effect, situated on the side of Darstellung~to staging or simple theatricality is necessarily to expose oneself to the possibility of missing the imperceptible play by which a "subject" is always, and without knowing it, already fabricated by fiction. That is to say, "written." However, read "Plato": you will see that writing works. But writing-and this is hardly surprising-is the last avatar of Stellung. It is, consequently, still a mode of installation-but a limitcase, and such that the stele threatens to offer itself no longer to sight, to ullveil itself no IOllger, as itself, standing upright, era.."t. It is not "nly" fault if in German-which is tar fronl being "nlY'" nla-

137

terna! tongue-writing can be referred to as Scl1riftstellerei, or if this word can also designate what we call "literature." That writing can be designated with this name defines 110 doubt its belonging or its subordination to UnPmtelltheit, to aletheia-Heidegger would have no trouble showing this. But as Hcideggcr is also the first to know, this subordination holds only to a certain extent.13~ Let us admit that it holds for that part of writing that can be phenonlcnally installed under the aspect of the mere trace., the trace that IS visi ble, perceptible., present to the eye, unerascd. But., as we know, this is not the case when it is a question of writing before the letter, a writing that is neither of the order of the visible nor even of the (in )audible-but is perhaps that by virtue of which the order of what can be said is installed (if it is ever installed), (dis)installed, imperceptibly., but only as though already hollowed our, corroded, undennined by an unassignable gap., a kind of hiatus or gaping hole that nothing can ever close or fill up since it is anterior to any opening., any virtuality, any potency and any energy, any possible reception of a future presence. -Since it will, as they say, have always already "taken place." We might understand .. then, we might begin to understand why, if this is what the writer Plato (at the limit of "his" powers and "his" knowledge) cannot avoid speaking of: he must again and again repeat in vain his attempt to capture mimesis and its "subject." For writing, in this last sense, does not infinitely reflect itself (place itself ttl abyme). By definition, it escapes specula(riza)tion. A text does not theorize itself; no aspect or idea of a subject., no unveiling (no matter how furtive) can compensate for or stabilize an evasion that is always unnoticed, not even felt., and whose movement elides itself, as it were, even before it is produced, leaving only an impossible trace-the scar, perhaps, of no wound. "I" do not know what relation all of this has, or can have, with death., time, or forgetting. All "I" can make out., because it is constantly legible in Plato (as UPlato"), is that the act ofwriring desperately confronts these, in (im)pure los~. Moreover, rllis is precisely the reason why theorization, for the one who writes, is not only inevitable but absolutely 1uccssary. It is at bottom always impossible not to convert the enunciator into a speaker, the speaker into an actor (a character, a figure., ultimately, a pure "voice")-and the sayable into dle visible or the audible. It is even impossible., because this conversion is never suffin8 See the ollmlysi."I, propo5cd b,· HCIt.tcggcr III An IntnlliflmoIJ to Metapl,.,flcs (ch. 1), of the Greek rhcnril..1rioll uf L-mguagc (of grammar) on the basis of the "model" furnished by written language

Typogmphy cient or truly successful, not to strive always to accomplish one more theoretical turn-to use the trick of the abyss. There is always, whether it is referred to or not, whether or not it is "shown,'" a mirror in a text ("Every poet is a Narcissus~" said one of the twO Schlegels), for this is the only conceivable means of overcoming the inevitable delay of the "subject" in relation to "itself" and of stemming., at least to somc extent, that inexorable lapse or failing in which somcthing is said, stated, written, etc. At least until the day-coming back now to our opening questions-when belief in it collapses, when it has become impossible to repeat (at least without ridicule) the same old rusc whose effects., in the end, have been exhausted. It is first of all the theoretical edifice itself that cracks under the pressure of seeking with all its power to complete or accomplish itself What begins to move, then, in the depths of the mirror, behind its shattered surtace (behind the debris of the idea, of the immortality of the soul, of anamnesis, of the subjea and of the living present, etc.), is the very terrorizing instability that the mirror was supposed to freeze. Mimesis returns to regain its power. The story is well-known; it is,.for CXflmple, the story ofa professor of Greek philology who is obsessed by the demon of writing and who wants to make a name for himself in philosophy. He believes seriously in himself, he takes himselfseriously for a genius., he sets himselfup as a rival of the greatcst figures of thought and letters-he even undertakes, seriously, to imitate Plato. We know that the consequences foreseen by the said "Plato," when he spoke of imitation, will not delay in coming. Indeed, let us admit that it is a question-this is at least what interested me at the outsetof madness. This would mean, therefore, that mimesi~ leads to madness, and that madness is a matter of mimesis. Or perhaps even that madness is imitated-or that it imitates "itself." But putting aside all mistrust with regard to the somewhat tiring complacency shown today toward nladness, who can guarantee that we have to do here with a result? But in a certam sensc:, in any case, \lI" "here'" decline all responsibilityall authority 10 tbe matter. I simply wanted to sec, "me" too. ~'Philippe

Lacoue-Labarthc"

2

The Echo of the SubJ'ect

It must be confessed that the self is nothing but an echo.

-Valery, Cahim I propose to take up in the following pages something (a question., if you will) that not only remains for me., I admit., without any real answer., but that to a certain point 1 am even unable to fomlulate clearly. What I want to understand., in fact, arc two propositions or statements, two declarations, that for a long time now "speak" to me or "say" something to mc-consequently, intrigue me-but whose meaning has always been very obscure. The two declarations remain nearly impenetrable, and thus, in a sense, too difficult., at least for what I feel are my capabilities. They mark in this way the frontier (where, like everyone., I constantly stand) of that properly placeless and undefined domain of all one "knows" only in semi-ignorance, by furtive presentiments, vague intuition, etc. The two declarations are more or less alike. The first is from Holderlin. It probably dates, if "authentic'" (and this is. plausible), from the period of his so-called madness. Like many others of the same kind., it was reported by Sinclair to Bettina Brentano (Bettina von Amim), who mentions it in a famous chapter of her book Die Git'llderode. It runs as follows: "All is rhythm [RhythmusJ; the

entire destiny of man is one celestial rhythm, just as the wm'k u11ique rhythm. I I

I~cmn.l

of IU't is fl,

von Amml. Die Gii"derode (I.eipzig: fmel Verlag, 1983). p. 194. One also

find~ among the statement!. reported hy Bettina: "Only tbe spirit is

poerry. the (me that

bear., in Itsclfrhe mystcl1' of an Innate: rhythm; and It IS by thb rhythm alone that It "an become: VISible: and living. f()r rhythm IS It~ sou)" (p 191)

TIlt Echo of the Subject

140

The second comes from MaUarnlc, and it too is very well known. It appears in La musiquc et les [ettres. Mallarmc is speaking of the Pm libre, and says simply, in the nrrn of a phrase, u. . • beca,use every soul is " rhythmic knot." l Propositions of this type are to be found elsewhere, of course: in Nietzsche, for example, or in others. (Still, these others are few; although the idea may be an old one, it is only the rare writer who has known how, or been able, to take it up.) But I will limit mysclfto these two, and with no other justification, for the moment, than the obsessive hold they have had on me, and continue to have. Such statements are a kind of emblenlatic formula. Or better, they are legends. I have ventured to inscribe them here, Iiminally, in order to indicate the horizon of the problematic. This amowlts to positing: these are the phrases that have dictated dlis work; this is the enigma that oriented it. Nothing more. This is why the question from which I will start remains stiD at sonle distance from these phrases, and from this enigma.

Subject (Autobiography, Music) With regard to theories which pretend to reduce all art to imitation, we have established concerning the latter a more elevated conception, and that is, that it is not a servile copy but a presentation of objec.:ts medIated by the human mind and marked with its imprint. Similarly, with regard to music, we have established that Its principle is sensation in a less material sense, namely as a general relation of representations to our own state and quality of internal sense. -A. W. Schlegel~

Lmml..'i 011

Art and Archaect"re

My point of dcparture is the following: What connection is there betwccn autobiogmphy and music? More precisely~ and to nlake things a bit more explicit: What is it that ties together autobiography, that is to ~ay, the autobiographical compulsion LZJl1IJng] (the need to tell, to confess, to write oneself), and hlusic-the haunting by music or the musical obsession? Such a point of deparntre is abrupt and has ev~ry appearance of being olrbitrary. I can .llso imagine: that dlC very usc of tcrms such as 1

SttplullC MJ.llam1c,

Ol.'lll'l-C's

(olllplilO (Pari': (lallllu.ud, IC).J.~). p 6+4-

The Echo of the Subjea

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"autobiographical compulsion" and "musical obsession" might be surprising. Let me quickly justify them. Because it appeals first of all to the notion and the fact of autobiography., the question proposed here belongs to the more general problematic of the subjea, and in this case; the writing subject. Or rather, though this can conle down to the same thing if we attend to the ambiguity of the reflexive construction (and allowing the accentuation of a certain 'I.desistance,'" to which I will rentm), the subject that writes itself [s'icrit]: that writes about the subject, that is written about, that is written-in short, the subject that is one, "on~" only insofar as it is in some way or other inscribed. Taking advantage of what can be condensed in the genitive and in the double sense (at least) that adheres to the word "subject" in our language, I might say simply: the subje&t ofwriting. As advanced here, this general problematic of the subject is an extension of what I have elsewhere designated as "typography."a It is based obviously on the lrreversible displacement to which the dlought of writing, quite removed from the reigning fonnalism or from its opposite, submits the "modem" relation between literature and subject (or discourse and subject, text and subject, and so on; the various denominations are unimportant here)-a displacement that comes about, beyond Heidegger and classical psychoanalysis (from Freud to Lacan, let's say), if only through this thought'S shaking of such philosophemes or conceptual assemblages as signification and meaning [l7OUloir dire], identity, integrity, auto-affection, self-presence, and alienation. Or if only through its shaking of a tenn such as "subject," since it still holds finn, be it as divided subject, split subject, absent, emptied, etc. But this problematic of the subject implies above all that if one attempts to tallow the path opened by Heidegger and rest the resistance of the concept of the subject (especially in that part of metaphysics that still survives indefinitely under the name of "the human sciences"), it is necessary to go by way of a deconstruction of the area of greatest resistance. Now, this area of greatest resistance~at least this i~ nly initial 3. ThiS work W.J.S proposed as .l contlnllation~ 111 a manor kl:Y. of "Typography," but It aL~ draws upon S(')mc of the analyses prcscnrcd in "1..'Obhtcr.mon" (published With ·'I.'echo du sujct" In Le st'Jtt de III plJilosophit (T:v/'o...lf"t'lpbics [) (Paris: Flall1marion, 1979), pp. 111-184. Ir is a revised and amplified version of' a te>.t that ~rvc:d a~ [he basi.Ii tc)r a seminar an 197~-76.

142

The Echo of the Subject

hypothesis-is nothing other than theoretical or philosophical discourse itsclt~ beginning (I'm thinking of Heidegger) with that discourse that takes its orientation trom the deconstruction of the concept of subject. l1lis is nothing other than philosophical discourse Itself inasmuch as it exhibits (and cannot avoid exhibiting, though in a manner that is subtle, devious, silent, and almost unnoticeable-even though authority is always speaking) a constant and fastidious preoccupation with its own subjCt.."t. Be this, finally, in the nlost stubborn denegation. That every philosopher should be inscribed in his (or her) own discourse, that he should leave his mark there, by or against his will, that it should always be possible therefore to practice an autobiographical reading of any philosophical text, is hardly new. Indeed, since Parmenides, this fact has probably been constitutive of philosophical enunciation as such. Nietzsche writes somewhere near the beginning of Beyond Good tmd Evil: "Gradually it has become clear to me what every great philosophy so far has been: namely, the personal confession of its author."01 Provided we observe the greatest caution in regard to the "psychologism" that inevitably burdens every declaration of this sort, there is for us, today, somedling incontestable here (and certainly, also, too quickly acknowledged). More interesting, however, is that, since Kant, since the interdiction imposed upon the dreanl nourished by all of the Modenls of a possible auto-conception (in all senses) of the Subject,s the question of the subject in general-and of the subject of philosophical discourse in particular-has fallen prey to a certain precipita.tion. I would even say, thinking here precisely of Nietzsche, its first victim (or its first agent), a certain panic. Examples are not lacking: whether it is in the speculative transgression of the Kantian interdiction, or conversely, in fidelity to Kant (as with Schopenhauer or even NietzsChe); whether in all the attempts to absolurize the subject or else in its most radical and most intransigent critiques; whether in philosophy "proper" or else in its undefined "outside" (its heart perhaps), that is, in literature, according to its modenl (Romantic) dcfinition-cvcrywhere, this obsession with the subject leads or threatens to lead to "madness." 4. Frlcdrlch NICt7,Mhc, Beym.d Good and £,,,1, rrafls. Walter Kaufinann (New York: Vintage, 19(6), p.ll. ~. I would refer here to JC:ln-Luc Nallcy's I,e lJlSClmrs de la syncope (Paris: Flam· marion. 1976). and E..I1D .\,,,,, (Paris: fJanm\arion, 1979). as well as ro the work we: did rogcrhcr In !.'nbrol,,/,ttfrRrrl (Paris: Scml, 1978).

The Echo ofthe Subjea

14-3

This process has its effects probably throughout the entire realm of art (and why not science as we~ something that should be examined) and most certainly is not toreign to the social and political configurations we live under (though here it must of course be treated in a carefully differentiated analysis). And yet, though we may name it for economy's sake a process of the decumpositWn of the subject, everything happens as though it produced within itself a strengthening or reinforcement of the subjcc~ even in the discourses that annOlUlce its dissol ution, its shattering, its disappearance. Speaking only of philosophy, this is fundamentally the entire history (almost a hundred years now) of the '~case of Nietzsche." We see it in the quality of exemplarity attached to Nietzsche's umadness," the almost absolute exemplarity deriving from the unprecedented power of fascination that it has exercized. As we know, neither Freud,6 nor Heidegger,7 nor, closer to us, Bataille (nor even Blanchot) has been spared. Nor many others, as one can easily imagine. Nothing prevents us from finding in this strange posthumous destiny a verification of Nietzsche's paradoxical, though entirely coherent (if not perfectly concerted) "success": the success of his desperate will (he who, better than anyone, was able to discern philosophy's subterranean conflict and who had pushed as far as possible the critique of the subject, the system, the work, etc.) to erect himself as an incontestable figure of thought and to sanction an "oeuvre" that he knew to be threatened (a work in the process of unworking [dCsoeuvrement]), that he had himself fragIf one reads, tOr example, Freud's ~orrespondence With Arnold Zwclg (Lmm of Stgmtmd Freud, ed. Ernst freud, trans. Tania and James Stcm lNew York: BasIC Book.~. 1960); see letters l.~o. 2.55,2.57, 1.6+, 1.78, and ~special1y 2.76), one may follow, right on the ~urfacc of the texr, rhe outline of a pure process of mImetic rivalry, grafted onto Zweig's prOJca of writing a "historical novel" about Ni~t2Sche. One can scc how Freud, having cxpn.'S~cd his reservations m minute detail, having served as an unaccommodatmg intermediary with Lou Salome, and having discouraged Zweig by cvery means possible (anuudang brmgIng up old gOSSIp c:oncerning Nlt.'t".ache~s syphihs. "contracted in a male bordello in Genoa"), opposes [0 Zweig another project, or a ~ounter-proJect, tc)r a "hls[orical novel" (a life of Shakespeare) and then triumphs-belatedly but definitivcl,'-m announcing his MostJ The "scenc" IS all the stronger in rhat Zweig had begun b)' multIpI~1ng precautions and dCclling gently with Freud's susceptibility (which he must ha\'e teared)-though of ('oune In the dumsiest manner pOSSible. constantly comparing Nier/Khe ... to Freud and suggesting that he was writing or wanled to write such a biography about Nict7.sche for want of being able to write one of the s:une kmd about Freud. But this is only one cxample; one finds ebewherc, In the Selbstdnmellll"lJ. the correspondence with Lou Salome, crc., ample m.ltcrial [0 conl1rm this point. 7 Sec "L'Obhteration.'" 6.

The Echo ofthe Subject mented, dispersed, broken, and taken to the very linlits of the calcination of text and meaning. In Nietzsche .. as after him (and in his wake)., the active destruction of the figure, whatever its mode (exhibition or ostentation, but to an equal extent withdrawal and the cult of anonymity, secrecy, and silence), aggravates against all expectations the burden of agonistic nlimesis in philosophy. TIle old fascination with biography, given new impetus by an autobiographical complacency (Ecce Homo underwriting Nietzsche's "madness"), and the old mechanism of exenlplarity that was naively thought to be inoperative and out of use like the old myths, continue to function. The desire for "figurality" has never been more powerful or more constraining, thus forcing us-and this is the least of its consequences-to return once more to philosophy and to its history, to the "score" and scansion imposed upon it by those who thought they had passed beyond, if not any problematic of the subject (or Subject), at least the limits of the historical and systematic field in which the subject held authority. This is why it is essential that the question of autobiography-that is to say, once again, the question of the inscription of the subject-be reconsidered anew. TIle problem to be dealt with is what I might call, for convenience, the closure ofexemplarity. For the momen~ at leas~ it is insuperable. But this hardly explains why a second motif should be introduced. Or why this second motif should be nlusic, the "nlusical obsession" [hantise musicale]. Isn't the problematic of the subject as envisaged sufficient, and isn't one risking here useless encumbrances and complications, even the possibility of taking this problematic beyond the point where, in practice, it can still be circumscribed? The introduction of this second motif, as I hope to show, answers to a necessity. But I should add that It derives first from a sinlple observation. Here again, Nietzsche is involved, as well as a few others. The question I asked nlyself is the following: How is it that on at least two occasions in the (modern) history of philosophy, a certain auto-biographical compulsion (linked, moreover, to well-known nlanifestations of pathology and deliriunl) shotdd have been aSSOCIated, in the clearest possible fashion., with what I have resigned myself to calling the ""musical obsession"? Obviously I'm thinking here of Rousseau and Nierzsche. And it will be understOod that by "'nlusical obsession," I do not nlcan a penchant or taste tor music, even exaggerated and tending to obsession, but rathcr n profi>und fnJstration, producing in

The Echo of the S"bject

145

rum all the pathogenic effects imaginable., of a "musical vocation," of an authentic desire to "be a musician'" (and to be recognizA..-d as such)such that henceforth, and wlder the efleet of this "denied" vocation that is constantly at work, music bcconles a kind of obsessional theme., or is invested with an exorbitant value, and can on occasion engage the work (and its subject) in an unnlcrciful mimetic conflict with a "real" musician (Nietzsche ctmtrtl Wagner, for example). Is this merely an accident, a chance conjunction? Or is there some neccssity-a constraint inherent in the very being and structure of the subject., in its desire to reach itself, to represent and conceive itself, as well as in the imposSibility of capturing or even glimpsing itself.-that actually links together the autobiographical compulsion and the musical obsession? I should note here that I would not pose a question of this sort if it were not that elsewhere., in "literature" (although the boundaries here arc still more uncertain than in the case of other domains)., a perfectly analogous phenomenon is to be observed with an undeniable regularity. Thus, taking only a few major examples (and without going back to Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau, a text that poses more complex problems), one can point to a number of German Romantics (especially Hoffinann), to Stendhal, to Proust., to the Michel Leiris of L'RlJe d'homme or the trilogy La regie du jeu, or to the Roger Lapone of Fugue. And this without nlenrioning, as the inverse case (or almost), the curious necessity that pronlpts cenain anlong the most famous representatives of the German Kunstlerroman, such as Hennann Hesse (in Gertrude) or Thomas Mann (in Doktor Faustus), to draw upon, directly or otherwise, the autobiographical torm. Let us admit, consequently, that the question holds up, and tllat some reason lies behind it. The interesting thing about the phenomenon at which it aims., as we can easily see., is that it should make it possible to rerunl, by basing the analysis initially on the intra philosophical distinction between the visible (the theoretical, the eidetic, and scopic, etc.) and the audible (or the acoustic, and I do not say the verbal)., to the hither side of the "theoretical threshold" itself. I r should make it possible to return to the place where the theory of the subject (but perhaps also tlJe subject of theory) would sc
The Echo ofthe SubJect own confession, it finally fails in this respect (though of cour~e one is not obliged to believe him ... ). TI,e book is The HfI,unting Melody. IJ At least this is what we would be referring to if a complete French translation were available. However, only the final part of this large work-and this is never indicated-has been published in our languag~ under the (uselessly soliciting) title V"riations psychfl,nalytiques sur un theme tk G'/stfl,17 MahJer. 12 It is true that this part is easily detachable; it does foml a whole, as they say, and can be treated as such. So we must resign ourselves. Still, even if this has little bearing on what I will try to demonstrate here, it would not be: a bad thing to have at our disposal an honest (if not conlplete) French edition of this text. These preliminaries aside, why address ourselves to this text? Essentially for three reasons. The first reason I anl keeping deliberately in reserve-my motives will appear later. It has to do with the tact, quitc simply, that the book is a "dleoretical failurc"-once again, by the author's own confession (although in this case nothing would pemnt us to doubt him in advance). TIle second reason is evident: it is that we have to do here with an lZUtobiography, I~ or at least a fragment of an autobiography, since there exists, to my knowledge, a second autobiographical work (Frl1lJment of fI, Great Con.fessi(m), H and since, in addition, a good number of Rcik's apparently nlorc purely "theoretical" texts (articles, sntdics, various essays) readily take ti,e form of autobiographicalnarrarive. We will encounter a few examples. In short, there is definitcly in Rcik c1 kind of "autobiographical compulsion," or, to use thc title of one of his works, a "confessional constraint," a need to confess, 15 of which The Haunting Melody is finally only a fragmcnt. Twice detachcd ... TIlcodor Reik. The HmmtntlT Melod,.'Y. Psyr/IOilHalytle 1i:~p''n''ll(es III I.ife Imd MilS" (New York: Farrar. S[rau~ and Young, 19S~). Subsequent rctcI"Cnces [0 th~ volumc will be: given in brackets in the body of the text. 12.. VnrurtiOtIS psydxaJm{,ulJues stir "" t/lillle de G'lltnp Maillet' (P.trls: Delloel, 19n). for the purposes of [hi~ l'SSay. I will rcta in [be title The Ha'Ult;H..1T Melod.v I~ ThiS IS why it was easv to detaCh this pan from all cn~mble that i .. wrltrcn III the st)' Ie of an l'S.\ay I... Fm..IT"lcHt ofa Great ConfeSSIon: A PsyclJOa'lR{vttcnl Allto/nogmpllJ (Nt."w York: F:ar· r.lf, Straus and Glro~ 194-9; rpt. Westport: Grccnwoo•.:l Prc.,~, 1973). The: phf3)c "tragIllcnr of a great confe.~ion" is from Goethe, who used it to refer to his entll'e: OCU\'fe. II.

(;,;sta"dnlSZ'Il,aHD ItHd Stmj17Cdi;'fi"s (192S), tTi1n~latcd J~ The (;ompIIlslolI to (Aliifiss: On tlJe PsydJOllllnl,:vsis t{ Crimt and PIIHislllllt:1If (Nt-'w York: farrar, Strau.. and Cudahy, 194i9). Ct: Rcik., S"rpriSc.· and thr Pf.VrlJoa"a~'Yst· ()" the C:07ljtctllre Imd (;011115

The Echo ofthe Subjea

149

But "autobiographical compulsion" means here., if the tcnn is even possible (and things begin now to be no longer so evident), "auto· analytic compulsion." This., either because the autobiographical com· pulsion masks itself and covers itself under the theoretical (and practical) pretext of auto·analysis, still more or less admitted in Vienna in the twenties (and for reasons that are not without interest, as we will see)-or because., inversely, it is a matter of an auto-analytic compulsion (with all this implies, as one might already imagine, in relation to the "tounding father" of psychoanalysis) that is able to satisty itself, that is, accomplish itself, through disguise: by way of an operation of a Uhtcrary" type, through Dichtung. This, in rurn., and as one might expect, is also not without domestic and economic, that is" familial and filial, implications. However this may be, the fact is that Reik, in his own \vay, deliberately practiced what is today called-according to a very old concept in which the essence of litcrarurc is at once determined and lost, but in which the essence of philosophy is probably l vmisemblablement] secured-theoretical fiction. This practice forces itself upon him with a double necessity, since in Rcik's work, as in psychoanalysis as a whole and generally in any theory of the subject, we are dealing quite simply with a theory of the ftgltre. I will merely cite as evidence Reik's other great autobiographical work, which predates by a few years The Haunting Melody, namely FTlf!Jment ofa Great Confession. This work closes on a note (which happens to be entitled "Rondo finale") in which, by way of conclusion, Reik calls into question the status of the work he has just written (is it a novel or a work of psychoanalysis?) and wonders if there won't one day exist "a new kind of autobiography ... in which one's experiences are not only told, but also investigated with the methods of modern psychology."'6 1bc second reason compelling us to read this work, then, is that we have to do here with an autobiography to the second power (autobiography as auto-analysis., or vice versa) .. even to the third power, reflecttrans. Marga~t M. Green (New York: Dunon. 1937), rcg.lrding (olrununic3tion as 3 function of the psyche; "lOur psychic materlall must aim, .lnl()ng other thlhgs, at commumcanng to Ut; somethmg about the hidden prolC'iJiC/i 111 .the other mind. We understand th~t; primary endeavour; II doc::. serve rhe purPO'iC of oommunic..atiol1, of psych lui dL~bllrdclUllCnt We ar~ reminded of freud'~ vIew that l1'lortab arc not so maLic as to rC[31O a !.Clrct. 'Seif-be[I"ayal oozes from aU our POfCSu. (p. 29) On the motif of confcs~i()n (.lnti mu.'I al\() the topic of psychoanalysis a.t; a u)J1tcssiioll of thar of wilich one is not awarc-dn~ at; a theory of confcsswll), onc might also consult Fm..I171Jmt o}'/I G,yfU C01if'cSS;oll, ch~ 22. and l~, esp. pp.446ft:

/»yllenslo1l ofUI'JCOIIJClOtIS P1'Ottrrcs,

16. FrtrgJllCIIf,

p. +9~

ISO

The Echo of the Subjea

ing upon itself by an additional theoretical tum (specular/speculative) in such a way as to present itself-we will rerurn to this point-as a theory of autobiography. The third reason, finally~ issues fron1 the decisive feature of the book, namely the marmer in which-unlike, for exan1ple, Fragment ofa Great CAnfession, in which a musical remini&'''Cllcc provides the occasion for the "autobiographical rc:ntm" 17_it associates in a very strict way the autobiographical compulsion and the musical obsession. But here it is necessary to begin to read.

Music Priming With me the perception has at first no clear and definite object; this IS formed later. A certain musical mood comes first, and the poetical idea only

follows later. -Schiller, cited by NietzsChe in The Birth of Tragedy

The association derives simply from the fact that the autobiographical (or auto-analytic) project takes its departure from a psychopathological accident (in the sense of the "psychopathology of everyday life") that is of a musical order, or implies music. It is not exactly an auditory hallucination (Reik may hear the voice-that is.. listens to itlS-but he is not hearing "voices"); rather, it is a reminiscence, the return, in very precise: circumstances, of a mcI<xiic fragment. Obviously an involuntary rc:rurn, and moreover one that immediately becomes obsessing or tormenting. What leads Reik into the autobiographical advenrure, what he also inlCsrigatc:s theoretically, and to the point that this questioning requires the power of his "analytic listening," is finally.. in all its banality, the phenomenon of a "'tunc in one's head" that "keeps coming back" (without rhyme or rcason, as they say), can't be identified., and, for a certain time at least, "doesn't go away" or "can't be gotten rid 0[" This is the phenomenon that I anl calling, for want of a better tenn, "catacousric.." in that it bears an affinity to the perception of a kind of inner echo and is conlparable (excluding its obsessive na· 17. Cf. "Age Sixty (A Note Before),n Ibid., pp. 1-4. IS. Fmg."mt, pp.249-2.50; and of course Rcik, Usttniug 1I"tlJ tlJt Tlmri Ear (Nl"W York.: Grove, 19+8), to which I rcnlm below. I lIhould nme, however, that the latter book, wrinen in [he United S[3res, takes up .lg:lin and populari7.cs the mc.'lc!i of S"rpnse nnd tile PsytlJOnnnlyst, a[ dlC same time correcting 'llII rcptitiously and firmly the ideology of American psychoanalysi.'l.

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ture, though even so ... ) to all the phenomena of reminiscence, musical or not, that have also been described or analyzed in literature (especially Romantic and Post-Romantic). Music, then, primes; it sets oft" the autobiographical gesrure. Which is to say, as well, dle theoretical gesture. The same device, used by Reik for getting started in the two autobiographical texts available to us (Fragment of a Great Confession and the one that will occupy lIS henceforth)., is tound again, in almost identical furm, in the theoretical texts. Whereas Freud starts, for example, with the forgetting of a proper llanle, a disturbance in memory, an art image (or even his OWl1 dreanls), Reik prefers to listen. It is the audible, generally, that awakens his analytic attention. The most striking exampl~ (and for good reason, since it is also of interest to nlusical aesthetics is that provided by the opening of the essay "Kol Nidre," which I cite here in part: Some time ago I stayed as a guest in the house of a music-loving family, .md there I heard a composition played by a cellist which, although 1 am by no means musical [!l, made a peatliarl.,v strong ml/WessUm on me [my emphasis, because it is obviously a matter of UnlJeimli,hkeit and we will have to rerum to this point]. A particularly solemn and impr~ive minor passage occurred thn.-e times and awakened a feeling of pre-acquaintance In me that mingled curiously with the sombre emotions the melody itself had aroused. I was unable to rcl-all when and where I had heard the melody bcfi)re, and conquering a disinclination to t.~hibit IgtlorallCe of a well-known composition in such a circle, I asked my hostess the .,anlC of the piece. She expressed astonishment rh.lt I did not k.now it, and dlen told me: that it was Op. 47 ()fMax Bruch, entitled "'Kol Nidrc," a modem frlOC sctting of the ancient melody which is sung in all the synagogues of the world before the service on the Jewish Day of Atonement. This explainl.-d to me my fueling of pre-acquaintance; but fuiled to account for the stm''B' mwtUm Iemphasis added1 accompanying it and fi)r the subsequent fat."t that the nlllc rail pcrsi:;tendy in my head dtroughout the folJowing day.19

Rdk goes on here to nlake an inlnlediate association with his childhood, and with the synagogue of his childhood, in practically analogous tcml.~: ~~I remembered the nlysterious trcnlbling that possessed the congregation when the C.lntor began the Kol Nidre ... and how I, c.:hild as I was, had Lx-cn c.:arried away by dlat irrt~istiblc wave of feel19 Sec ThcoLior RClk. "111& Rrllini. PsydJoa,ur{ytlC St14dl4'S. trnnJ. l)ougla.o. Bry.m (Nl"W Yurk. Intcmnriol1al Univt.TSit)' Pres,." 19..6). p.•67

IS 2.

The Echo ofthe Subject

ing ... [yctl certainly incapable of understanding the full meaning of the wordS."lCl But one notes again the salnc phcnonlCllon, though in this case it is a second beginning (a "rc-priming"), in the tcxt devoted to the shofar and to the origin of music. 21 It i~ a text in which Reik tells us that he is going to probe into '~the most obs(.llfc region of the Jewish litutyy, a terra. incoB'zita comparable to a primitivc forest, reverently avoided by the science of religion, rich in confusing., mysterious, frequently even uncanny characteristics," and where the musical reminiscence introduces the theoretical question that concerns him: "It is a long tinte since I heard the sounds of the shofar, and when recelltly, In the interest of this work, I heard the shofar blown on New Year's Day, I could not completely avoid the emotion which these four cnlde.. fearsome, moaning, loud-sounding, and long-drawn-out sounds produced. I do not attempt to decide whether the reason for my emotion was the tact that I was accustonled to this sound from youth, or whether it was an effect which everyone might feel. 22 If I point immediately to these texts, even before having covered the first lines of The Haunti,'B Melody, it is not simply to clear the ground or set out some guideposts (such as Unheimlichkeit, or the purely emotional, affective character of the musical effect). Rather, it is to designate from the outset the difficulty that Reik encounters tbeoretical~"I, and to which, ac; is suggested by the fomlal analogy in narrative or discursive procedures, the autobiographical undertaking will be destined to respond. This difficulty involves precisely that which, widlin the general problematic of an aesthetic uguided by an economic point of view" (as Freud says), or else in relation to the question of the origin of rirual .. cannot be called an "acoustic fantasy"-that which, in other words, slips or intrudes betJJJeen the two registers: that point where, in all probability, the Freudian theory of the subjct1: conles apart.l~ On the one hrutd, dlere is the register of the verbal (the "ntore than aCOLLC;ric," if you will), presiding, at least as model, over the description of the operations of the unconscious, of its writing whkh has been coded Ibid., p. 168. 11. Ibid .• p. 216 U. Ibid., P.2.37. 2.~ This i-. without taking mto ""le Illdl\,IJlI~ll M~,th of the Ncuf{)f1c, or ~P()e[ry anc..1 Tnlth' III NClIrOl»IS," p. Wo.

The Echo o/the Subiect might be called "the first implicit experience of death."" back, as one will have gue..~sed, to the mirror stage. 52

171

TI1US

it led

It is one of the most fundamental and ~t conseitutin experiences of the subject that this something inside him which IS alien to him and which is called the Ego, that the subj'"'Ct first sec-ii himself in an other, more advanced and more perfect than he, and that he even sees his Dim mUlge in the mirror at a peribd when analytic experience shows him to be incapable of perceiving it as a totality. . . at the same time mat he is himself undergoing the original disarray of all effi:ctive motor fimctions that belongs to me first six months after birth [emph.tsis added].53

What was thus constn1cte~ via the Freudian imago and the mirror stage (the text of 1949 ["Le stade du miroir comme formateur de la fonction du }e"], moreover, was fairly clear on this point) was a theory of the figure and of ftction-a theory of death as figure, of the double, and of the dead double as GestRlt, in the Hegelian and above aU postHegelian sense of the tenn. For the entire analysis ended by organizing itself aroWld the conclusion that the "fourth element" ill the quaternary structure (and this time a very Hegelian, perfectly dialectical quatemity) is nothing other than death: the imagi1zary death (of a subject itselfimaginary or specular), whose mediation is constitutive, however, of the subject function in general-given that there is no subject, as such., that is not alienated, divided., doven. The mediation of this ~fourth element" would also be constitutive, therefore., bringing back into vigor the eidetic transcendence of Platonism whose logic Hcideggcr brought forth, 54 of the "giving of meaning" itself, or of what establishes, in its W1vc:rifiable truth, as Lacan said, "the measure of man." In which case, and tlus is indeed what Lacan stated in conclusion, the theory of narcissism is nothing other than the mlth of The Phetwmetl%gy u Ibid., p. n. Which should be reread here and saved from the simplificationll to which It has bc:cn Sll bjected. especially conu.'t111ng the role of l:mguage (and therefore of the mother) in the initial phase of supplying for the deficiencies of prematuration SJ. "The Ind1\'ldual Myth of the Neurone. or 'Poetry and Truth' In Ncur05is,~ I')' 33. The French text re:ld.~ as follO\vs: C'cst une des experiences Ics plus fond:unenmles. les plu:. cunstltutl\,c... pour Ie sujct que ce quelque chose a.IUI-meme ctranger al'Intcm~ur de lUI qui "'appdle Ie Moi, que Ie sujet se VOlt d'abord dan~ un alltre, plus 3v3ncc, plus part~it que lui, ct que nxmc II voit sa proprc image dan:. Ic mimlr a UI1C croque all I'experlence luouve qu'd ~t mc:apJ.blc de l'apcrcc\'(}1r con'U11C line totahtc ... , alors qu'il cst lui-meme dans Ie dbarroi origincl de toutes Ics fOO(.:tions motriccs eRective... "lui cst lciUl dl.·~ SlX prcmlLTs mois aprcs la 11.11ssanc:c." H- Apro~, l"Ssentially, of Nietzsche and Junger, see "Typ()graphy." 4j1.

The Echo of the Subject ofMind. Or, at least, it is alone capable of"accounring for certain facts that ntight otherwise remain enigmatic in the Hegelian theory'" since "after all, in order for the dialectic of a struggle to the death, a struggle of pure prestige, simply to conte about, death cannot be realized, otherwise the entire dialectic comes to a halt for want of combatants; and it is necessary that in a certain manner death be imagined."55 In other words (this goes without saying), speculated. I recount none of this analysis in order to "criticize" it. Everything here is unquestionably right (perfet-rly accurate), also true (on the basis of truth considered in its essence), and in any case theoreticlJlly unsurpassable-even if it ntight evenrually be reworked (by LatCUl himself, for example). I pause over this text only because it allows us to inscribe in a particularly effective manner the ensemble of problematic cJenlents that has occupied us here within the horizon offigurlJl ontology (specular and speculative), or, if you wiD, fiaional ontology (Lacan speaks of myth in this text, but it comes down strictly to the same thing).1i6 Three reasons for pausing over this text, then: l. Because (and this was my immediate pretext) this analysis allows us to account for the Reikian mechanisnt or set-up (which it partially exploits): the doubly specular, quaternary strucrure-the mirrored square from which is engendered, because it frames it, a fiction that is entirely of the order of a novel, and that will soon be seen to oscillate between auto- and allo-(bio)graphy (a narrative of the life of Mahler and a narrative of the inlitation of the life of Mahler, which was previously an imitation of the life of von Biihlow, etc.). This leads us back to something very dose to the "family romance," minus the family, 57 whose model Freud established, and constitutes in fact the first degree of Ufictioning" in The Haunting Melody (or-at this level of analysis, there is no difference-in that quasi-love story, Fragment of a Great

Confession) .!ill More important, such an analysis defines what is really at stake in what Rcik, following Thomas Mann, calls the "autobiographical inl2.

~5. "The Individual Myth of the Neuronc, or 'Poetry and Truth' in NeurOSIs," p. 35. 56. In "The Mirror Stage," Gestalt and fiction are taken up explicitly ~7. Sec Marthe Robert, Romnn tks ma1llel et ungme lit, rtmI41I (Pans' Gras~ct, 1971.). 58. A love story Ul unitatlon of the Se~nhcim epL~e-and an which RClk's first wlte: is implicated. TIus cannot be said of Tile Haunting Melod.." which docs not breathe a word of the lovc for AJma Mahlcr (passiol1..J.[c and dlStant) that Relk bore for a long tmlC. (See J. Palaci, "Remembering RCIk." in Le PsydJOloBue mpns, trans Denise Berger (Paris: Dcnoc~ 1976), PP 9-31

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pulse,"!l9 and which is coupled here with a subtle auto-analytic impulse. At least, it defines indirectl,.'Y what is at stake. But this suffices to make it possible to locate the inhibition, the double inhibition at work here: both theoretical, by subm~ssion, and also literary, artistic (~~I dreamed that [this work) would become a ~great' book .. ,").60 Indeed, taking form around the question of the status of analysis (is it a science or an art?), and organizing itself, as is revealed at the end, in rclation to the speculative dialectic, Lacan's analysis allows us to postulate-if we relate it openly to Reik, that is, to an analyst, and an analyst himself implicated in the ~'personal myth" and the narcissistic, imaginary, specular, mimetic scenario that he first helped to reveal-that what is at stake in Rcik's venture is nothing other than his very position tIS analyst. By this I mean not his position within the Vienna Society, or the legitimacy of his "lay" status, or even his need for Freud's recognition (although there is also this), but rather, at the most acute point of the mimetic conflict, his position as subject of the theory of the subject (or as subject ofpsychomlalysis). This means, first of all, the subject, in fUll, of the analytic theory itself.-a theory, as we know, that teSted itself, following the circular, self-annulling schema of anticipation, by constituting itself directly from the "empirical subject," Freud "himself," whose theory it established (thus repeating, at least in its initial premises, a certain Hegelian reversion from the desire for knowledge to the knowledge of desire, and the circulation, again Hegelian, of at-lto·conception). But because psychoanalysis could not, by definition (that is, as a "science" of the unconscious), construct itself on the model of Hegelian Science (but rather, mutatis mutandis, on the divided, equivocal model of a "phenomenology"), it also means the subject, in fuU, of that fiction, that Dichtung from which comes necessarily, though always subordinated in advance by the theoretical anticipation, the "narrative," or the '~epos" of auto-conception. By figures, or, in Freud, by typings. This, finally, is why Reik, at the very intersection of the theoretical and the fictive (in their point of internal overlap), becomes involved in the theory of auto-graphy as well as that of music (areas abandoned by Freud), and at the same time "fictions," in a novelistic or autobiographical manner, a book that is to be a "great book." This in the sense that Freud, as Reik is the first to recognize, and thus envy, is a "great w

Frrrgmmt. p. 2.1~. 60. ThiS IS not to be so clearly found elsewhere, especially not in Fmgment (where,

It 15 true, muSlC docs not come Into question).

The Echo of the Subject writcr,"61 comparable to the greatest (Sophocles, Shakespeare, etc.), of whonl Freud himself was jealous even as he recognized his debts. Rei~ moreover, never fails to recall this last point, superimposing always on Freud (in Fragment, but also in The H rmnting Melody) the rutclary figure of the "great Goethe." 3. Finally because Lacan's analysis takes into account (but it is necessary to continue to "double" the analysis, rcintroduce Reik, and fiU this lacuna) the subject of the theory of the subject in its jicti(m, in the figural problematic lJilJuratique] through which every theory of the subject passes, as in the fiction where, by a repercussion, the subject of that theory himself cannot avoid becoming implicated (directly or indirectly, as in the case of Freud and Moses). 62 It takes into accowlt, if you prefer, the text and the texis proper to it; that is to say, not only the difference separating the enunciation from the enunciated (or separating the subject of the one from the subject of the other), but also the fundamental dissymmetry of the "quaternary" relation or specular doubling-the dissymmetry whereby, for example (condensing), Reik will never be to Freud what Mahler is to Beethoven, because, not being Mahler (not being an artist), he has even less chance of being Goethe than Freud, to whose theory he submits himself (at play here is all the disparity of starus and prestige lying between the theoretical and the fictive, science and art). And thus, because it takes into account this discord that no speculation can dialectize because it is inscribed in the specular relation itself, it is very likely that we are dealing here with a loss of the subjea, undermining in advance any constitution, any functional assumption, and any possibility of appropriation or reappropriation. This loss of the subject is imperceptible, however, and not because it is equivalent to a secret failing or hidden lack, but because it is strictly indissociable from, and doubles, the process of constitution or appropriation. For this reason, I have already proposed to speak of (de)constirution.6 ' But this is makeshift. What should be noted here, with and against Lacan, and going back from Lacan to Rcik, is that there is a constant though muffled breakdown of the imaginary, of the See! 3l1\OI1g other texts, From Tbtrty Tem'1 ""tll FrtUJI. p 9. Takmg mto aC:t."Ount, in Lacan's tc~, the reo-cat of [he mythical itself Within the: thcory of myth and cOlucquentl)· also the kllld of abys~1 separatl(')n. in whu.:h JII narc.:issisric reassurance \'.1dllato. bctWCl'l the deSire for knowledge: and dle "will to gCnllLIl"-what i.acan, who rcfcrll only to the Reikian analySL-; ()f the! "case of Goethe," and who givcs no rctercllcc ro it.'i mil1k.1:ico-.1.utobiographkal frame, could not do. 63. T rctcr here to ..1,'Oblircranon.... 61 62.

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resources of the imaginary. The imaginary destroys at least as Illuch as it helps to construct. More precisely, it c?ntinually alters what it constructs. This explains, perhaps, why the subjcct in the mirror is first of all a subject in "desistance" (and why, tor example, it wiD never recover from tbe mortal insufficiency to which, according to Lacan, its premaruration has condemned it). It explains aLc;o the delay, the inhibition, the apres-co,,,p effects, the deterioration-in short, everything belonging to the deadly repetition that is at work in more than just the so-called obsessional neurosis. We are dealing here not with a pure rupture of the econonlic in general, but with the slow erosion of appropriation. Undoubtedly death must be "imagined" for the dialectic of recognition to be able to function. But the dialectic of recognition itself does not perhaps function so well, not only because every subject is on its way to death ["en passe" de nwurir], or even because it is irremediably separated from itself (as ~'subject"), but simply because it comes to itself only in losing itself. The "theoretical~' conscquence (though at the limit of the theorizable) : the figure is never one. Not only is it the Other, but there is no unity or stability of the figural; the imago has no fixity or proper being. There is no "propcr image" with which to identify totally, no essence of the mlaginary. What Reik invites us to think, in other words, is that the subject "desists" because it must always confront at leRSt two figures (or one figure that is at least double), and that its only chance of "grasping itself" lies in introducing itself and oscillating between figure and figurc (between dlC artist and the scientist, between Mahler and Abraham, between Freud and Freud). And this perhaps accounts for the logic of the double bind, the "double constraint," at least as it is borrowed from Gregory Bateson in Girard's minlctology. Everything seems to point to the fact that this destabilizing division of the figural (which muddles, certainly, the distinction between the illlaginary and the symbolic, and broaches at the sanle rime the ncganvlty or absolute alterity of the '~real") is prccisely what is involved in the ~nlusical obsession.." connecting it, as a result, with the autobiographical compulsion itselt:

Agony AGONI£, 1580 (Montaiglle)~

in its modem meaning ru. ID the expression "death agony"; formerly, '''angUish of the soul," Xlve (Orc.-;mc, sometimes under the

The Echo of the Stlbject form a(n)goine), from which the modern meaning is derived. Borrowed from ecd. Lat. agtmia., "anguish" (from the Greek agonia, prop. "struggle," whence "agitation, anguish"). -Bloch and Wartburg~ Dicti01maire ctymolog1que de la /a''lItle [mnraae

We must start again, here, from Reik's theoretical failure, or rather from his theoretical quagmire, since "inhibition" certainly has something to do with it. Why does he get bogged down? We know now that it is due to Rcik's inability, in the proceedings of mimetic rivalry, in the agon with (Abraham) Freud, to strike down the idol, either by regaining strength on his own terrain (that of autoanalysis, along with everything that goc-s with it) or by winning ground where his competence is lacking (in music).64 In both cases, the theoretical floundering-which is in part the same thing, though only in part, as his pure and simple submission to Freudian theory-is coupled, as is logical, with a renunciation. Here, between submission and renunciation, the plot begins to take shape; all the more so as renunciation coincides in this case with the failure and blockage of auto-analysis. The first theoretical renunciation affects the problematic of autobiography. Everything happens very quickly: the theoretical movement is hardly sketched out before it aborts. Freud, and the overwhelming theoretical constraint he represents, is not without a role here. Once again, the episode is linked to the immediate consequences of the eulogy for Abraham presented to the Viennese Psychoanalytic S0ciety. Rcik, it will be remembered, had accompanied Freud to his home, which had given him the time to hear from Freud's own lips a judgmellt of his funeral eulogy. Reik continues his narrative as follows: The conversation With Freud remained in my memory because it touched a subject which had preoccupied my thoughts in dle last weeks befOre I \Vent on Christmas vacation. I planned then to write a paper on the primal fonn of autobiography and the motives that made men write the story of their lives. I had sttldied the history of autobiography as far as I could gather material [a compulsive gesture that is frequent in Reik-for 64. Relk is perfectly aware of what IS at stake an the book For cxam~')lc: "As Silly as J[ sounds, I mu~r ha\'C grotesquely exaggerated the lIuportance and signifkancc of [hat study an my dayd~~ms and must have atttibutec.t a singular placc to it in analytic hterature" (MekJd;v. p.370). flOW

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177

he had read nil of Goethe I in 1,n.'SCnranons of ancient ('ultur~ and followed its traces until they wert~ indiscernible 10 prehistoric times. [There dlen follows a short treatise on autobiographY.l The first autobiographies were not written, but chiseled Into stone. They arc to be found in dle tombs of the Babylonian-Assyrian and Egyptiall civilization~ and can be traced back as tar as about 3000 B.C. We have autobiogrnphlcal documents of this kmd from old Egypt about great personalities of the court. They have typical featllrcs an common and appear as self-glorifications of achievements, a~ documents of ~lf-nghtL"Ousncss. The cr.l\'il1g for fame and a desire to live ill the memory of postenty become clear later on. In the inscriptions on tombs, dle wish is expressed "to bring one's name to eternal memory in the mouth of the living.~ Thus, the stones really speak (saxa Ioqt,u1Jtur) and become monuments for the dead. 1l1e desire to be admired and loved seems to reach beyond one's lite. There must be other motives of an unconscious kind that pro~ pcUed men to write autobiographies~ for IDstance self-jusnfication, relief from unconscious guilt feeling and Odltts. Such motives reveal the~ ~elves an Rousseau's Confessions, in John Henry Newman's Apologia pro V,ta Sua and in modern autobiographies. Walking home from the meeting, the conversation with Freud echoed in me and led me back to the subject of the beginnings of autobiography which were originally conceived with the thoughts of one's death and were written, so to speak, from dle point of viLw of one's own memory with postcrity~ Stlb specie mortu. The desire to live in thc memory of later gc:nerations, as it is cxprc:sscd in the tombs of ancient Egypt, mu~'t have led. to the thought of the weighing of the souls in Egyptian religion. The Judgment Day in Christian eschatology and similar ideas are expressions of a free~ftoating, unconscious guilt feeling and make men terrified that they will be punished in the beyond. In some artists this guilt feel1Ilg concerns their works: they .Ire afraid they have not accomplished em>ugh.t''i (Melody, pp.136-2.J7) example~

I have citcd this piece-this "genealogy" of autobiography-almost ill itli clltirety so that onc may fully grasp the movement that carries (and paralyzes) it: namely, the way in which a certain breakthrough, however enlhryonic, is suddenly arrested and brought back (by way of the themes of a feeling of guilt or the desire for glory and eternity) to the nlost classical thcoretical schenla, that of narcissism. It ~ quite visible. Examining what he thinks is thc archaic, primitive 6~. Sc~ 11Jt Comp,,/sum to COlrJ'os. 1I~ ";", and In particular 1')'.306-308, where the a.\suagcmcnt of guilr by confession is c.lircc:d~· rela.[ed [0 [raged\' and to ArIStotelian cJ.[hmi~.

The EdJO of the Subject history ofautobiography, Reik encounters, in the incision or inscription of the type (in a certain typography), nothing other than the prehistory of fiction, the prehistory of nlodcling and of the plastic cOllstinltion of the subjcct (and II fortiuri, beyond what he knows or nleans to say, the prehistory of spccular or narcissistic recognition). What he encounters is thus what he relates elsewhere, having read Nietzsche and not hiding the fact, to style (or to the Utypical," the "characteristic")-quite aware that the whole problematic of rhe double and of repetition must be subordinated to it. I am thinking ill particular of the nwncrous pages in Fragment ofII Great Confession where Rcik sets out an entire doctrine (I have alluded to this) of destiny or the "demonic."1'16 But having thus touched on the subfoundation of narcissisnl (and thereby of nlimcticism), Reik retreats behind the guilt and obsessional inhibition of the artist-consequently behind a Freudian motif--missing, by the sanle gcsrure, what might have authorized his speaking of autobiographical constraint or compulsion: the necessary re-citation, though futile and deluded in its desire for recognition, of an inaccessible prescription. It is ahnost as if the theory of inhibition inhibited the theoretical breakthrough, that kind of"intcrior deparntre"-out of, but nJithi'lz the theoretical-by which Rcik tends to rejoin "empirically," through research and history, the foundation of figurality. This latter is the most hidden layer of ontological discourse; in it, trom the Timaeus to Nietzsche (passing undoubtedly also through Kantian schemarism), the figure of theory i~ decided, precariously, in the theory of the figure. Precariously: this is a difficult, uncertain discourse. One in which, well before the universal "photology" or the universal "ideology" of philosophical discourse properly speaking, the two nll1:aphorical registers of 66 See fi'R!fllJmt, pp. J9 and 78-79 (ntodcl.md repetition of the model, Se~c:nhein' and Tile Vi'Rro/Waktjicld); p. 100 (moc.tchng. ~tylc••,nd d1C double); p. 211ft: (dcstllly); and p 170: "Freu~ ha.~ shown that throughout life men and WOIUt.'U repeat a certain experience ... It IS as if destiny compels them to find themselves 111 d,e same )()clal ()r J').'iychic ~.tuatlon~. Freud has alS() demonstratec.t that in tht.'SC cases in whith a 'U)'Stc rious f.'\tc bnnp about the sante course of evans, dt.~nny COnte~ in rt.-ality from widun. The comr)ulsion of repetition is to a gI"Cat cxtt.'"Ilt ltetcm,int.-d by unconscious tcnltencles whkh work upon the person and dlrca hl~ aCDOIl.\. It doc~ not matter whether those at.t'lol'UI ICeld to plea.'iant or unforfUI'atc cxpcrlt.'1'C:t.'S. l11C I:OnlllUlslon of repetition o~...al\:S "hc...")'ond the ple3'iurc: prmuplc .. Rc.-f(>rc Freud, Nietzsche remarked that a person who ha...1 dcfilUt~ charaucr has also .l typk:tl expenence th.1t Oc..t.UI S ag.un and agall1. GOc:ri1c ubscn'Cd the 'M'1n1e phenomenoll long bcfi)f"c tlte'iC two grcat psychologi.d to metaphYSlcal questions in his thoughts: Why did you live? Why did you suffer? What is the sense of life? Questions to which an answer is given in the last movement. In other words, the original concept is now put into another frame. It is as if one's own life and emotions were lookc..'ets an old friend after many years and this man tells him about an experience he has had in the meantime. The "I" fonn of the presentation is kept, but me storyteller, the I, is only a recorder or observer. Although he sometimes speaks of his own opinions or emotions, he remains an episodic figure, while the often unheroic hero experiences a tragic, comic or tragi-comical destiny. It is psychologically recognizable that this I, this recorder, tells either a PlISt experimu of his at JI,hieb he nOli' looks from a

b,rd's-eye vie11', or prtse1as a potentiality cf his OMl D,hich never aa.,ally became a ,-eRlity In his lift.

The psychological advantages of this technique of presentation-not to mention the artlStic ones-arc that it allows the stOryteller a detachment from, and c..~en sometimes a kind of emotional aloofness toward, his own experience of a past potentiality of his destiny. The person of the writer appears, thus, pyschologically split into two figures, the I, the storyteller, and the Me. me acting or suffering character. One can assume mat this tc.."Chnique of presentation is appropriate to the seIt:'observing or introspective side of the writer. (McltJd."I, pp. 2.S4-2.5S; emphasis added)

This is all quite dear and should require no conmlentary. The "musical scene," as it were, remains still the same: the funeral ceremony (that is, more secretly~ the scene of agony). But we sec now the reason for it: the death of the other (the hero, the rival) is always at bottom my own death. The schema is that of identification along with everything this entails-the death wish and guilt~ narcissistic intoxication and the feeling of failure, etc. Mahler at von Buhlow's funeral, Reik in his Austrian fore~t the evening he learns of Abraham's death. This is why the music laments-music in general laments, be it "joyous," "light," "pleasant" (illverting the lamentation into an exaltation of my immortality). What it lanlcnts is always my own death (unpresentablc as such, said Freud:

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its very inevitability is refused by the unconscious, and the Ego must learn of it through the intermediaries of figure and scene).7B What touches or moves me in music, then, is my own mourning. For this reason, what appears here in the description of a situation of indin.."Ct narration (which, in addition to the novels of Somerset Maugham, characterizes, for example, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus), and in the disguised autobiography and the specularization of writing in the first person, is nothing other thall the mimetic dement, the same that is found, whatever Plato might say or want to think of it, in the "simple narrative," the haple diegesis. There is no writing, or even any discourse, that is simply in the first person-ever. Because every enunciation is abyssal. And because I cannot say my dying-even less my being already dead. If all autobiography is an autothanatography, autobiography as such is, rigorously speaking, impossible. Reik, in his way, demonstrates this flawlessly. But there is more. For in this first program (reversing the course followed by Plato and moving from lexis to logos), the second and third movements, tollowing the first, which "recounts" the funeral ceremony in honor of the hero, are conceived of as "interludes" recalling the life of the hero-the second concerned particularly with the "memory of happy times." Now, it is pree isely this programmatic description that Reik chooses to cite in extenso. The narrator or witness continues to recowlt, but this time the scene takes on (is this such a surprise?) an utlheimlich quality.

It happened that you were at the burial of a person dear to you and then on the way back suddenly me image of an hour of happiness, long passe~ emerged. This image has an effect similar to a ray of sun: you can almost forget what just happened. Whl.'I1 thl.'I1 the daydreamer awakens from his fantasy and returns to life:, it may be that the unceasingly moving, never understandable busde of life becomes as ghasdy as the moving of dancmg figures in an illuminated dance hall into which you look from the dark night, from so far away that you cannot hear the music. The nlrning and moving of the couples appears then to be senseless, as the rhythm clue: is missing. (Me1od." p. 2B) The scene, of course, is not so happy as it promised to be at its outset. It is indeed a scene of "resurrection," in continuity with the first 11l0vcnlent: ~'You awaken; you rerum to life." In other words, a scene S'gmulld Freud, "Thought.., tor the Times on War and Death," St(mdtJrd Ed#Um vol. ' ... pp.273-JOO. 78

J

The Echo of the Subject

of torgc..1:ting. As Freud would say~ no one ultinlatcly believes in his own death. The same logic is still at work here. This is why the scene veers toward the U,lheimliche. 79 It veers in this manner toward the U,,heimliche, into this estrangement of the familiar~ by way of the "musical" mise-en-ahyme (if this is conceivable)~ which is itsclfvery stra,we in that music itself is given the role of awakening the awareness of its own absence and of the impossibility of perceiving it. It happens not so much because the sounds themselves are nlissing, but because of the lack of rbythm: "the rhythnl clue is missing." The lack of a rhythm that is heflT'd renders the distantly perceived scene of the ball "phantomlike" and "senscless"-fantastic-and creates the malaise., the feeling of a distancing of what is close, the quality of "between lit'C and death,n and the appearance of automatic panic that are perfectly recogllizable and typical. Rhythm, then, is heard. It is not seen-directly from the movements of the dance, for example, from the repetition and regularity of its figurcs. On the contrary, without rhythm, the dance (it is a waltz) hc:comes disorganized and disfigured. In other words, rhythm, of a specifically musical (acoustic) essence here, is prior to the figure or the visible schema whose appearance, as such-its very possibility of being perceived-it conditions. This is why its lack throws off (scopic) perception, and estrml!Jes, defamiliarizcs, disturbs tlle familiar, the visible, the phenomenal, properly speaking. What is missing, Plato would have said, is an idea. For what is missing is quite simply a "participation" (categorization, schematization): in this case the repetititm or tenlpoml (not topological or spatial) constraint that acts as a means of diversification by which the real might be recognized, established, and disposed. Or more precisely, since in this case we have to do with a dance in which the movements and figures are themselves performed it, imitatWt' of an (inaudible) music and since rhythm is consequently the figure, esse"titdly the figure (which itself is perhaps not essentially of the order of the visible), what is missing is the repetition on the basis of which the repetititm ofthe dance (the dance as repetition, imitation, and within it, the repetition offigures) might appear. Missing is the repetition from which the division nlight be made between the mimetic and the non-mimetic: a division hctween the recognizable and the nonrecognizable, the familiar and the strange~ the real and the fantastic~ the sensible and tlle mad-life and fiction. 79. Sec, III freud's C.....~1y "The Unc.l1l1lf' (.Wandard Edmoll. \'01. 17), t."Vcrytlung related to the n."prc~l1tation of death and the omnipott.-ncc of thoughts (pp 2.42 and 247).

The Echo of the Subject

19S

The absence of rhyth~ ill other words, is equivalent to the infinitely paradoxical appearance of the mimetic itself: the indifferentiable as such, the imperceptible par excellence. TIle absence of that on the basis of which there is imitation, the absence of the imitated or the repeated (music, which in its very principle is itselfrepctition) reveals what is by definition Wlrevealable-imitation or repetition. In general, nothing could appear, arise, be revealed, "occur," were it not for repetition. The absence of repetition, by consequence, reveals only the unrevealable, gives rise only to the improbable, and throws off the perceived and wen-known. Nothi1't1 occurs: in effect, the Utlheimliche 80-the most uncanny and most unsettling prodigy. For in its undecidability, the Unheimlithe has to do not only with castration (this also can be read in Freud), the return of the repressed or infantile anxiety; it is also that which causes the most basic narcissistic assurance (the obsessional "I am not dead" or ~I will survive") to vacillate, in that the differentiation between the imaginary and the real, the fictive and the non-fictive, comes to be effaced (and mimesis, consequently, "surfaces"). Without the beneficial doubling (or because, according to Freud, of the change in "algebraic sign" the double undergoes in the development of the Ego),B1 the immediate certitude of "primary narcissism," its confused, blind, ante-specular recognition, is shaken. In which case, rhythm would also be the condition of possibility for the subject. But let us not go too quickly; let us remain a bit longer in the vicinity of the Second Symphony. Although we had reason to anticipate this point, we will understand bettc..-r now why dle section following the utlheimlich movement (the waltz) in Mahler's program, after a prayer for redenlption given to a solo voice-the passage from lamenting to imploring-is a "vision" (Mahler's tenn) of deliverance and unanimous resurrection snatched from the terror of the Last Judgment: the famolls chorale based on the poem by Klopstock, "Autcrsteh'n." The return to music, to the song (properly speaking, to the cantidc)-thc chorale, let us not forget, is here in the position of a citation, referring back to Bach and to the I neludang the: !>cnsc HCldeggcr gives to it 111, for c.xanlplc, "What Is Mctaphys~ Iund Of the ~ea., the central humming of the sca~ Are old men breathed on by a m.u:emal VOICC, Children and old men and philosophers, Bald heads with their mother's voice still in their cars. The self is a cloister full of remembered sounds 106 "111C Unc.'U1ny~" p. 14S. 107 In P1"ldlOn"n~"Itisc/Jt SChriftt'IZ zm'[,ztcmtzI7' u"d K zmst (Wicsbadcn: 1964-). l'ran'i. M Schneider ill MIISiqllc en jm 9, pp. ~-6

Limes Verlag.

The Echo of the Subjea

207

And of soundc; so far forgotten, like her \'oic~ n,at they rcttlm unrecogni7.cd. The self DctL"CtS the sound of a voice that doubles its own, In the images of desire, the forms that ~pc~ The ideas that come to it with a sense of speech. n,e old men, the philosophers, are haunrcd by rhat Matl.TI1al voice, the explanation at night. 1tlll loS. Wallace Stcvens, ~hc Woman That Had More Babies 11tan 1113[," OPIIS PostlJlmwlu, cd. Samuel French MorlOc (New York' Knopf, 19~7), p.81.

I

The Caesura of the Speculative

Alles schwebt.

-Anton Webern

The purpose of these remarks, extracted from work in progress, will be twofold. First, I would like to show-but this is scarcely a thesis, so evident is the point, fundamcntally-I would like to show that tragedy, or a certain interpretation of tragedy, explicitly philosophical, and above all wanting to be such, is the origin or the matrix of what in the wake of Kant is conventionally calkxi speculative thought: that is to say, dialectical thought, or to take up the Heideggerian terminology, the ontortheo-Iogical in its fully accomplished form. It has been known for sonle ~ time, or at least since Bataille, that the dialectic-the mastering thought of the corruptible and of death, the determination of the negative and its conversion into a force of work and production, the assumption of the contradictory and the Aufbebung [releve] as the very movement of the auto-conception of the True or the Subject, of absolute Thoughtthat the theory of death presupposes (and doubtless not entirely without its knowledge) a theater: a structure of representation and a mimesis, a space which is enclosed, distant, and preserved (that is, safeguarded and true if one hears, as did Hegel, what is said in the German word Wahrhett), where death in general, decline and disappearance, is able to contemplate "itself," reRect Uitself," and interiorize "itself." This space, this "temple," and this SCene were tor Bataille the space of sacrifice-a "comedy," he said. I We all know this celebrated analysis. On the other hand, what is a little less known-and which I would like to emphasize (. See "Hegel. la mort cr Ie ~acrlfkc." Dmcni'01J rm of the closer it is, the more distant rt IS; the more dissimilar it is, the more adequate it is; the more illterior it is, the more exterior it is. In short, the maximum of appropriation (for the perpenlal comparison here originates in a movement of passing to the linlit, and proceeds necessarily from a logic ofexcess-of the Sll perlative) is the ma.ximum of disappropriation, and conversely_ "The more infinite the interiority ...

Thc Cacsura of the SpeCt41ative the more rigorously the image must diftcrcntiate the hun1an being fron1 the clement of his sentiment ... One can well imagine the analysis thdt might be undertaken here on the basis of the contradktory structure implied by the mimetic rclation-on the basis of the "double bind." This obsession with the ncar and the di~tant (or, what anlounts to the sanle thing, peril and protection) cuns through, obviously in addition to the poems, even some of the greatest such as "Patn1os," all the correspondence (with Schiller, in particular), and constitutes the privileged metaphor-if at this point it can still be considered such-of the detailed description Holderlin gives of his own cyclothymia. Such an analysis would be perfectly justified; all the more so in that it would inevitably have to touch upon what is progressively articulated, in that inflection to which Holderlin subjects mimetology, with regard to the general problematic of the subject of enunciation. But by the same token, nothing would prevent us from recognizing in this paralysis affecting (without end) the very movement of the dialectic and the ontologie, and beyond the evident gesture of conjuration., the return effect of mimetology within the speculative, and., consequently, within the general discourse of truth and presence. It is true that Heidegger constantly sought in Holderlin the possibility of backing up from the assumption ill tlle speculative mode of adaequatio, and of "'exiting" from nlithi" the onto-theo-Iogic. This is; why the "logic" of aletheia can also be inscribed as the ~'Iogic" of Ent:fernu"l1 [/-lo¥fnement, or U(dis)distancillg"J. But who knows whether this "logic" itself (including, too, what ceaselessly carries it off in its most demanding moments) is not also penetrated throughout by (if not subject to) mimetology? The "logic" of the open-ended exdlange of the excess of presence and of the excess of loss, the alternation of appropriation and disappropriation-all that we might baptize, following H6lderlin's tenninology (and for lack of anything better) the "hyperbologic~" together with everything that holds it still within the framework of the "homocotic" definition of truth-who knows if this IS not the (paradoxical) truth of Rlahcia? Y'I

In allY casc, it is such a ~'hypcrbologic" tl1at evidently undcrli~s the final definition of the tragic proposed by Holdcrlin. Here it is-it is very well kl1own: The prc!.cmdtioll of mc trdgic rc~ts principally upon rhls: that the mOIlstrou.\, the fJl."t that God and man couple, and the tact that without limit

The Caesura ofthe SpeculRtive the power of nature and the inncmlOst of man become one in fury, is cOI'lCch't.·d in that the limitless becoming-one is purified through limitless separation. (Werke, PP·73S-736)

It is again a matter of catharsis. It is even much more: a "generalization" of the theory of catharsis, if you will, but one which can be such only in the abandonment of the terrain upon whidl Aristotle had constructed his own-that is, the terrain of the "spectacular" relation. Indcc:d, such an understanding of catharsis proceeds by taking into acoollnt the "subject" of tragedy or of the draIllatic utterance. Th is is why it carries with it., Over and above a simple "poetics," an entire thought of history and of the world, of the relation between man and the divine (or between heaven and earth), of the function of art and the necessary "catastrophe" by which the natural becomes the cultural, and of the general movement of alternation or of exchange of the proper and the nonproper. Once again, I cannot go into this any further here. I should emphasize, however, that only the "hyperbologic" is undoubtedly capable of accounting for the scheme of the "double turning about" upon which Holderlin's last thought is founded and according to which the very excess of the speculative switches into the very excess of submission to finitude (a schl."Il1e in which the Ucategorical" turning about of the divine corrcsponds to the volte-foce, as Beaufrct says, of man toward the earth, his pious infidelity., and his extended wandering ('under tile unthinkable," which fundanlentally define the Kantian age to which we belong). Whatever we might make of such a thought, the lesson, with respect to tragedy, is as clear as can be: the more the tragic is identified with the speculative desire for the infinite and the divine., the more tragedy presents it as a casting into separation, differentiation, finitude. Tragedy, then, is the catharsis of the speculative. Which means also the catharsis of the religious itself and of the sacrificial-a final paradox., and not one of the least surprising. What authorizes such a definition of tragedy, first of all, is nothing other than H6ldcrlin's reading of Oedipus the Ki,'B. This reading is based entirely upon a condemnation that (ould not be more explicit with regard to the indis.c;ociably speculative and religious temptation in which Holderlin finds the fundamental motive of tile Oedipal "fable" and the reason for its ~\composition"-comparable, he says, to the Ullt()lding of a \~rial of heresy." What, indeed, is Oedipus' tault?

The Caesura ofthe SpcculatiJ1e

233

It is, Holderlin answers, to act "as a priest." The response is surprising. But here is the beginning of his analysis-it is impeccably dear: The intclltgibility of the whole rests primarily upon one's holding in mind the scene in which Oedipus ilzterprets too ;,1ji7r#e(v the word of the oracle: and in which he IS tempted in tile directiolZ of tile nefas. [The transgres.~ion, the sacnlege, is thus the excess ofinterpretation.) For the word of the oracle is: He ha~ clearly commandc..'t.i us, Phoebus the king, To purit), the land of the defilement that has been nourishc..'ti ground And not to Illirrurc what cannot be healed.

011

this

This could mean [emphasis added: this is the: literal. profane. political translation of the oracle's statement]: ... keep a good civil order. But Oedipus immediately speaks in a priestly fashion: Through what purification ... (Wake, p.731)

uAnd he goes into particulars," adds Holderlin, meaning to indicate that the movement has from this point on become irreversible, and that Oedipus, indeed, will conduct his own trial of her~y. Thc tragic fault consists, then, in the religious and sacrificial interpretation of the social ill. The tragic hero goes under, as Schelling would say, for wanting to carry out the ritual and for desiring a pharmakos in order to remove the dcfilement which he imagines to be sacred. He is destroyed not by di- I rectly provoking the punishment, but by calling up the old ritual of the scapegoat victim. He is destro}'l-d, in short, by his belief in what Girard calls the religious "mechanisms," which are in fact, though with regard to a different concept of religion, usac..Tilegious" mechanisms, because they presuppose the transgression of the human limit, the appropriation of a divine position (Antigone will be an cxemplary case) and the appropriation of the right to illstitute difference: by oneself(this will be the C3.4iC of Oedipus just as well as that of Creon, fur such a reading of trdgedy indeed definitively precludes that one: could even conceive of a '~p()sitive" tragic hero). Thus., he who desires difference and exclusioll C'(cilldcs himself, and suffers, to the point of irreversible loss, this inexorable" unlimited differentiation that the'lohyperbologic" introduces in It') doubling of the dialectical-sacrificial process in such a way 3.') to prevent its allmination and paraly-.tc it fi'om withi". Tragedy, because it is the catharsis of the speculative, presents disappropriatioll as d13t which secretly aninlatcs and constinltL-s it; tragedy presents (dis )appropriaI

The Caesura of t/1e Speculative tion. This is why Oedipus incarnates the madness of knowledge (all knowledge is the desire for appropriation) and represents, in his tragic course, the "'demented quest for a consciousness" (Werke, p. 7~,): nothing other~ perhaps, than the madness of self-consciousness. This reclaboration of the interpretation of tragedy cannot fail, in its nlnl, to touch the dialectical-stnlctural conception of the organization of tragedy. It results, in any case, in the subordination of the theory of the alternation of tones. Indeed, from the moment the mimetic structure no longer guarantees in principle the reconciliatory and reappropriating ~'return to the Same"; from the moment the tragic spectacle presupposes, behind it, the irremediable loss of every secure position and dctennination of enunciation, and sees itself condemned, as a consequence, to represent the process (itself at all times complex and differentiated) of (dis)appropriation, everything then forces the dynamic and productive successivity that strucrurally organized tragedy to give way to a mechanism of pure equilibrium. The structure of tragedy itself becomes inunobilized and paralyzed. Yet this does not in any way prevent this "neutralization" of the dialectical dynanuc from being constantly active. For the tragic structure also remains dialectical, and on1y the deconstruction of the Sophodean-Schellingian (or Aristotelian) model of the tragic rcquin.-s this (de )structuring of traged y. This, in fact, comeS down to "disorganizing" tragedy in the strongest sense of the term: desystematizing it and disjointing it. It consequently comes down to reconstructing it at the very point where its dialectical organization confirms itself: upon an empty articulation or the lack of all articulation, a pure asyndeton which H~lderlin calls the "caesura" and which suspends the "'catastrophic" process ofalternation: For the tragic transport is properly empty .U1(.'I the most unbound. Whereby, In the rhythmIC succession of representations, in which the transport presents itsclf~ Jvl1at i1l meter is called the 'Resum, the pure word~ the counter-rhythmic intrusion~ becomes llecessary in order to meet the racing alternation of representations at its cullllination, such that what dppcars then is no longer the alternation of representations but representation itself." (Werkc, p.730) Such a disarticulation of the work and of the process of succession through alternations that constitutes it as such-by which we pass (and here again, by what effect of "rcgrcsslon"'?) from a melodic conception of the work to a rhythmic one-docs not do away with the logiC of exchange and alterncltion. It simply brings It to a halt, rc-

The Caesura of the SpeculatiJJe

235

establishes its equilibrium; it prevents it, as Holderlin says, from carry~ ing along its representations exclusively ill one sense or another. It prevents (a protective gesrure, which docs not necessarily mean a "ritualistic" one) the racing oscillation, crazed pa'lIic, and an orit..uation toward this or that pole. The disarticulation represents the active neutrality of the interval between [entre-deuxJ. This is undoubtedly why it is not by chance that the caesura is, on each occasion, the empty moment-the absence of "momcnt"-of Tircsias's intervention: of the intrusion of the prophetic word . . .

* For "tragc..~y," in Gc..nnan, one says Trauenpiel-literally, "play of grief or mourning." Something diffc..Tcnt, then, if you will allow mc such an association (in fact, not really so free) from the "work ofmouming," the sublimating learning of suffering and the work of thc negative-the two conditions, as Heidegger has shown, of the onto-logic: Arheit, meaning labor and work (oeuvre), and algos, that IS, logos. Why would we not conclude, then, that in (dis)organizing tragedy in this way, H61derlin caesumed the speculatipe (which is not to go beyond it, or to maintain it, or to sublate it) and, in so doing, rediscovered something of the Traumpiel? At any rate., we know that H61derlin wrote the following about Sophocles-its simplicitY' is disarming: Many sought in vain to say joyfully thc most joyful. Here., finally, here in mourning, ir pronounces Itself to mc.li" 17.

Hllldcri. n, Sa",tliche Wtrke. vol. 1.1, p. ~O~.

4Holderlin and the Greeks

For something to come about, something must depart. Hope first figures as fear; the first appearance of the new is fright. -Heiner M Liller

Whl.l1 H61derlin begins to write, a specter is still haunting Europe: that of imitation. Though the cenrury born under dle sign of the quarrel oc"tWl.ocn the Ancients and Modems will come to an end with the French Revolution, the style of this revolution, its BestUl and ethos, is itself neoclassical-imitated from Rome or Sparta. And in the thinking Germany of the epoch (which is also to say the Germany that thinks bl."Cause it is marking, or believes it marks, an "l.1X>Ch" in history), in spite ofeverything-in spite of the Hamburgische Dramaturgie and Sturm U1ld Drtmg (I cite at random), Herder's Ideen zur Phu(JSophie tier Geschichte tier Menschheit and the interest in Diderot, Moritz's cosmopolitanism and aesthetics, especially in spite of (or pc..-rhaps because of) the Crisis opened up by Kant, a rent or schism that nothing and no one can manage to nlend-Winckelmann in fact still niles. Winckclmann, and this sentencc, in which he sUO'llnarizcs the general agonistic in which a whole culrure exhausts itself and a nation probably misses its birth: 'lThe only way we can become great, and, if this IS possible, inimitable, is by imitating the Ancients." I A gigantic histOrical double bind, .uui the consequent threat of psychosis. I. Johann Joadunl Wlnckclmann. "Gt:dankcn ubc:r die Nachahmung dcr gncchlschcll Werke m lier MalcfCl lmd Bddh:tucrkun!>t," III Rijltxtons SlIT J',mitatto1l des oCIIlrrcs grc&lJucs c" print"rc ct til 1&"lpt,m:, t.xi Leon MIS (Paris: Aubicr, 1954), p.95.

Holderli'lz and the Greeks

2.37

In any case, nowhere else are the Greeks to this extent an obsession. In the thinking Germany of the 179OS., they cast their shadow on a world that is sharply stratified, rigid and closed, making the Enlightc..l1ment [Ies Lllmiiresl more of a twilight. The Modenl is late ill coming. TIlis also means: Germany is late. Yet as Holderlin begins to write, there is talk of a dawn: Morgenrot. Jakob B6hme's old word will be very much in circulation, at least where things are decidc..~ in this fin-tie-siecle decade-precisely where Holderlin will never manage to make a place for himself: Jena, standing under the control of Weimar. But why docs one speak of dawn? Bc..acause, thanks to Kan't and in defiance of him, a theuretical solution to the fixed and insurmountable contradiction between Ancient and Modem seems possible: a means is glimpsed for sc..wng free the Modem. Or rather, a means for transforming it through the work and the effect belonging to a twist lvithin the mimetic machine itself, a means for nlaking the Modem, subject to those inaccc..-ssible masters, the Greeks, master of the masters. Everyone now knows that this theoretical pr()gmnmation of the Modem (but henceforth the Modem will always also be theoretical), which, through and beyond Nietzsche, will govc..Tn Germany (and not only' Germany), is outlined for the first time ill Schiller's aesthetic writings. Hegel, professing aesthc..1:ics in his tum, will not fail to credit Schiller for being the first to have taken the step beyond Kant, and to have claimed the speculative fulfillment of truth "even before philosophy recognized its necc.."Ssiry."2 The thc..-orctical solution, in other words, is the dialectical resolution. Thc Atlfliisung itself. The fimdamcntal text, here, is the triple essay "Naive and Sentimental Poetry." We know from the analysis begun by Peter Szondi 3 that this essay was initially Schiller's first attempt to settle the question of his rdation to Goethe-to the cnlshing model that Goethe r'-1JresCllted in his eyes. A matter of mimetic rivalry, of course; and an attempt., necessarily reflexive and theorizing, to break the indefinitely binary rhythm of identificatory cyclothymia. But the limited double bind of Schiller's rdation to Goethe was in this case identical to the 2. Lacollc-I.abarthc LS citing the French tr3115lation of thc 18~~ cdinon of rhe Astbttik: l-:Ithttiqlle. trans. S. Jankclc"jtt.h (P.lrIC; Aublcr, 196+), p. 8,.-Ed,t01" 3- Peter S7.0I1dl. "))a5 Naive M das Scmimcntali5dlc: Zur Bcgriff.c;dlalektik in &hillc..'f5 Abhandlung." an Lckh,rnl Ulld l ..ekti01"": Vmu(1J fibtr L,teraluT, Literalllrt"tom J..,teratu,-sozlOlogK (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 197~)

,,,III

238

Holderlin and tile Greeks

general double bind of the rclation to the Greeks: Goethe already passed for an Olympian gL~ljuS, with an aspect as cxaltLxi and a starure as imposing as Homer's. A GrL'Ck, in short, miraculously rising up in the arid-artificial-West. But what doL'S '~a Greek" mean to the era? It means, in the wake of Winckebllann and his variations on the ~'Grcck body," and after the divisions introduced by Rousseau, what could be in1agincd and positL~ as a being ofnattlre. Which is also to say, corrciatively, what the modem beings of culture could no longer even hope to become again, howevL~ powerful their nostalgia, since, as Schiller said, "nature in us has disappt"ared fron1 humanity."" Thus, one considers Greek" or '~naive" the poet who is nature who uonly follows simple narure and feeling, and limits himself solely to the imitation of actUality"; 5 on the other hand, the P()(.-t who seeks nature or desires it, as though called by the lost matc..Tnal voice, is modern, or "sentimental." For the art to which he is hL~ceforth confined CSSL~­ tially entails dissociation, division, dL'SOlation-contrary to narure, which harmonizes and unites (man with the world and man with himself). These motifs-or rather, these thL~es-are well known. It is generally less frequently remarked, however, that these thL~es finally come down to a historical translation, or Uhistoricizing," of the Aristotelian definition of art, of techne. This was undoubtedly Schiller's decisive gesrure. "Generally speaking," a canonical text of the Physics says, "on one hand techne accomplishes what phusis is incapable of L1fecting; on tl1e other hand, techne imitates phusis."6 Interpreted historically, this double postulation can yield this result: art, sO far as it imitates nature, is specifically-and fullowing Winckelrnann-Greek art: mimL~is is Greek. On the otller hand, it is up to the ModLTns to accomplish-to see through or bring to term, to complete-what nature cannot carry out. Consequc..~tly, it is up to the Modems to go a step beyond the Greeks-to "accomplish" them. That is to say, also, to surpass or surmount tl1l.m. A numbLT of years later, in tLn1lS that he probably also considered anti-Rousscauistic and which, as in the case of Schiller, were actually in a direct line with Rousseauism, Kleist will say in his essay "On the )

.... Frlcdrtc:h von Schiller, "Naii1t and s,:"tlnlnltal Poetry" allfl Juhus A. Elia~ (New York: FrlcdrIL.h Ungar. 1966), p. tO~ ~. Ibid., p. liS. f) Cf. ~ranC:l!. M. Contford'j; tran~latl()n lit Aristotle, 11Jt PIJYSltS, Ilarv.ud University Prl~, 1~7). p 17~.

.

(to"

the Subllllle,"

\'01. I

(Cambndge

tTall!..

Holderlin and the Greeks

239

Marionette Theater": "But Paradise is locked and the chentbim behind us; we have to travel around the world to sec ifit is perhaps open again somewhc..-re at the back ... we would have to c..»at again from the Tree of Knowledge in order to rerum to the state of innocence." 7 This is exactly' what SchiUer, in his OWll words, had wantc..-d to say, and what he had said: "We wc.....e narure . . . and our culrure, by means of reason and freedom, should lead us back to nat1.lre."8 In tihc.."Se lines, as elsewhere (one might also lise the examplc..-s of Schelling or Schlegel) the scheme we find-which is the very matrix fur the scheme of the dialectic-is constructed on the basis of a rereading, explicit or not, of Aristotelian mimetology. And co1lsistently, the operation has a cathartic end or function. The speculative resolution is perhaps still a mode of catharsis. In other words, a good use of mimesis. We know furthermore that the opposition of Naive and Sentimc.."Iltal involved a whole series of oppositions for Schiller, not only historical (Ancients and Modc..TIls), geographical (as for Winckelmann: South and North), or aesthc..1:ic (plastic and poetic, epic and lyric), but also properly philosophical. They are borrowed, in this instance, from Kant: inruitive and speculative, objc..~ve and subjective, immediate and mediate, sensible and ideal, finite and infinite, necessary and free, or, to shorten the list (but we are gathering here all of mc..~physics itself), body and spirit. In strict Kantian orthodoxy, or, as Holdcrlin will say, in strict fidelity to Kant, these oppositions should have remained oppositions, and as such, il'rdy (a remote echo here of Arlstotle) has the function of purifying. Tragl-dy-that is to say.. tragic art. For the Greeks, something foreign to which they had to apply themselves and through which they had to pass, according to the law stated above~ if they were to have the least chance of appropriating what they properly werc. It was therefore theu" dl"stiny not only to tunl away from heaven and to f()rget, in all faitilfirJ mfidelity, the divine which was too immediately close to theau, but aLfiO to organize thiS henceforth sober and sobcrl.'CI life and to maintain it within a proper Ineasurc. Hence the fact that they built an I.~cmpire of art" and excelled ill heroism of rcflcctton and calm vigorI.~strong tcndcnless,'" H()lderitn says (Werke, p.94-5), thinking of the ~\athletlc bodf' described by Winckehl1anll-as in what the technical

H olderlin and the Greeks

245

rigor (the mechane) of their poetry allows w, to call '''clarity of expositioll" (Wcrke, p. 940). As the ~rst letter to B6hlendorff says: "The Gn:eks are less masters of the holy pathos, because it was innate to them, while on the other hand, from Homer on, thl.j' are superior in the gift of rcprcscntation~ lx.-causc this extraordinary man was soulful enough to capture for his Apollonian realm the occidental /u1UJnian sobriety and thereby truly to appropriate that which is foreign" (Werke, p.940 ). nle Greek Nai·ve is consequently acquirl.-d. And it is nothing that one might relate, in any way whatsoever, to somcthing natural. But this acquisition was also what caused the ruin of the Greeks. A poetic sketch almost contemporary with the texts to which I allude here says that, prccisely bl.~usc of their artistic mastery, "the native (or the natal) was left idle" and that "Grl.x.~c, supreme beauty, founderl.-d." 12 Something, then, ~'toppl.-d the GrL"'Ck J.X"Opie in their mOVCmL"Ilt of appropriation. Something difficult to assign, but in which is hidden, pt.Thaps, the enigma of the impossible approximation of the proper-that is, the L"Iligma of what HcidL-ggl.T thought as the law of Ent{enlUng, e-loig1zement: the approach of the distant which yet remains the distancing of the ncar. Or what one might think in this context as the law of (dis) appropriation. I' Perhaps, too, it is necessary to relate this thing to what H6lderlin calls, in writing of Oedipus Rex, and with a word that is not accidl~ntally takl."Il from Kant, the "categorical turning away" of the divine: "Since the Father.," the ek~ Brot und Wein says, "turnl.-d his face from men and since mourning, with good reason, began on earth." 13 When the Greeks, in the tragic moment of their "catastrophe," forgot themselves by forgetting the god-properly the moment of the caesura, of the gaping or interrupting articulation around which Sophoclean tragedy is organized, but which also perhaps (dis)arriculates history itsd~-the divine probably withdrL~v definitively, definitively turned about, itself forgetful and unfaithful, but as such appropriating itself in its very distancing (it is of the god's essence to be distanced-e-loigni) and forcing man to tum himself back toward the l.~rth. For since the Greek Cltastrophe, sllch is in fact the lot of Western man.

Notes to Antigone: Sec Chaprcr 3. Ilore 10 I~. Translated by Michael Hamburger brldg~ UnIVersity PrcS5, J980). ll.

In

PomIS Iwd f·""DUlmls (Cambridge:: Cam-

H oldcrlin and the Greeks For us-given that we stand under a Zeus more properly himself, who not only holds II limit between this earth and the savage world of the dead, but also .fiwtes more deeisively tOJMrd the Mrth the course of nature ete:mally hostile to man in its path toward the: other world, and givt.'Il that this grcady changes the essential and patrioDc [mterliindischen] representatIOns, and as our poetry must be patriotic, such that its material be chosen according to our Vle:W of the world, and its representations be patriotic-Greek representations vary in that their principal tendency is to be able to grasp and compose the:mM!lves (because this is where their weakness lay), whereas the principal tendency in the modes of representation of our time is to be able to strike something, to have address; tor the absence of destiny-the dumuwon-is our weakness. (Wcrkc, p. 788)

This is why Holderlin can say that the Modem-the Hesperian or Western-is the invLTse of the Ancient, of the OriL~tal. What is proper to Us is sobrit~, clarity of exposition. Bccause our reign is that of finitude. Also of slow death, if one thinks of what the modern tragic must be ("For this is what constitutes the tragic for us, that we leave quietly the realm of the living ... and not that, consumed in flames, we atone for the flame that we were not able to subdue"- Werke, p. 94-1); slow death, or "wandLTing under the unthinkable" (Werke, p. 785), as in Oedipus at Colon'lS or the c..~d of Ant!!10ne. Dereliction and madness, not a brute, physical death; the mind touched .. and not the

body. But this proper, even should it escape a tragic catastrophe, is still the farthest thing away for us-the most ncar/distant. On the other hand., what we excel in is "sacred pathos," the dc..-sire for an infinite and mystical transgression: the "Sentimental," in the strongest sense of the word., the one given to it by Schiller.. or "speculation," in the sc..~lse of Idealism. But to no Ic..-ss an extent, subjc.."etive Poerry.. in the Romantic sense. This is why, if we must undergo the experience of this foreign dement (go to Bordeaux, for example: cross France "prey to patriotic incertitude and hunger"), I .. nothing, ill what is accessible to us of the Greeks-that is, nothing in thdr art-can be of any help to us whatsoever. Because they never appropriated what was thc..~r proper, nothing of the Greek beil1g-irrc..~rievably buried, lost., torgotten-could ever be recoverc..~. The Greeks' proper is inimitable because it 1lever took place. At the very most it is possible to catch a glimpse of it, or even perhaps deduce it from its opposite-art. And then introduce it, apt·es 1+. In a Icrc,-'f to Casmllr Ulrich Bohlcndorff of aurumn 1802., Holdcrtin speaks of the men and womcn of southern france who havc grown up "Ill the anxiety of pamotIc unc..-crtamty and hunger" (Werke, p. 9+~).-Ed,t01·

H olderlin and the Greeks

247

coup, into this art. Hence the work of translation (and I am thinking more particularly of the translation of A nti!1one, conceived as the most Gn.-ck of Sophocles' tragedies), which consists in making the Greek text say what it said endlessly Jvithout eller sa"."Iing it. Which consists, then, in repeating the unuttered of this text's very utterance. But the fact that the proper being of the Grc..acks should be lost, and consequently ininutable (what the Nietzsche of The Birth ofTrll9cdy, as we can sec, will not have heard), does not in the least mean t1,at we nught imitate what remains to us of the Greeks-that is, their art., that by wh ich they tend to be, in aU impropriety and srrangc..-ness in rdation to themselves., ncar to what is for us., still so distantly., proper. Greek art is ininlitable because it is em art and because the sobriety that it indicates to us is., or should be., nature for us. Our nature (sobriety) can no more take its bearing from their culture than our culture (sacred pathos) can take its bt.-aring from their nature-which was nevc..l carried into efft.-ct. In the chiasmic structure that shapes history, thc..-n, there is no longer any place, anywhere, for an "imitation of Antiquity." "It is probably not allowed for US.," says the first letter to BohJendorif, "to have with the Greeks anything identiall" (Werke, p. 940). Greece will have been, for HolderJin., this inimitable. Not from an excess of grandeur-but from a lack of proper being. It will have bt.."Cn, t11crefore, this vertiginous threat: a people., a culnlre, constantly show~ mg itself as inaccessible to itself. The tragiC as such, if it is true that the tragic begins with the ruin of the imitable and the disappearance of models.

5 Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis

Who states the paradox? Who, in general, states, is able to state a paradox? Who or what is the subJea of a paradox? But also, because the word has given the title: Who, in this particular text attributed to Diderot, in "Paradoxe sur Ie comedit.-n," states the paradox? Not: Who declares its law or certifies its exactinlde and truth? But very simply: Who is the author of it and responsible for it? Who takes, or can take, the responsibility for saying: "I am the subject of this statement, a paradox"? 1 Toward the end of Diderot's text, toward the t.~d of this diRlogue which is the "Paradoxe sur Ie comcdicn," the two antagonists, whom in principle we know only by the indications "First" and "Second," appear to have almost exhausted their arguments. More precisely, their discussion, that false oratorical joust dominated by the First, ends by turning to the latter's advantage. The Second, who until then, it seems, could hardly do more than cue his partner, but who in reality has constantly forct.-d him to speak, now proposes a test. He says, in essence: You have just developed at length a theory on the art of the actor which offends comnlon sense, and to which, as you sec, I cannot subscribe; let us move on to the t!Jeater, and see if we can verify it. every case an thiS volumc, (,.0"'£1' ~ translated 3." "to state," and ""'OlICt" as "statement." It ~hould be noted, how(.'Vcr, that "t() ~tarc" or "~ratcmc:nt" [)(;ars a propositional or dedarawry connotation thar is not rlt."t..'CS5.uil)' u}nvc~'l.-d an the French rcrms, particularly 3~ they arc defined In hnglli~tit:.t; "'1'(, utter" and "utterancc" would dlcrcforc aL"o be appropriarc alternatives in many cases, though the)' have: not been USl.'tf here tbr rca,;oln of c()l1sisrcnc.:y.-Editor 1

A"

In alm()~t

D,derot: Pareulox and M,mesis

2+9

Thus, the dialogue proper is internlpted (to resume only in extremis). As the antagonists agn:e to pass on to the theater, it passes to

narratiJ1e. This is how the episode is presented: Our two interlocutors went to the playhouse, but as there were no places to be had they rumed off to the Tuileric.~. They w.1lked for sonlC rime in silence. TIu:y seemed to have torgotten that they were together, and each talked to himself as if he were alone, the olle out loud, the orher so low that he could not be heard, only at intervals letting out words, isolated but distinct, from which it was easy to guess that he did not hold himself defeated. The ideas of the man with the paradox are the onJy ones of which I . as they must be can give an account, and here they are, disconm-ct:ed when one omits in a soliloquy the intermediate parts which serve to hang it together. He said: . . .2

TIlere follows, indet..-d, a long "soliloquy" that is intt..Trupted by the narrator's incidt..~ta1 remarks and that turns quickly, confonning to a practice long claimed by Diderot, into a true "interior dialogue." But it is an interior dialogue that is spoken "aloud." Thus, it fits into the whole of the dialogue as its exact counterpart, en abyme; in a manner so perfect that the First hinlSClfwill be taken il!to the illusion and imagine that he has "continued to dispute," when in reality he has both asked the questions and answered them-and the Second has not listenL-d but only dreamed. This movement is clearly not without interest, and even if it is not very new or very "modem," it probably merits study. But this is not what prompts me to rt..-caJ1 the episode. The real reason (I will put it in the fonn of a question) is this: Why is the subjt..-ct who takes charge of the narrative hen; and exhibits himself as such., in the first person, able to say that "the ideas of the man widl the paradox are the only ones of which 1 can give an account"? Is it simply because it has just been mentioned-in an initial narrative sequence, it will be noted., assumed by an impersonal subject, a neutral voice, ('~from which it was easy to guess. . .")-that the First's soliloquy or monologue is spoken "aloud," and that the narrator, having heard it from his position as wimess, is able to record his words? Or is ~

11lt: n-anslatlC)I1 of uparadm:c sur Ie comcdlcnn CIted hen: I~ t'(,tmd m Dldcrot. CCTbe P"rruIox ofActutq" ""d ('Masks or F"ca?" cd. Wilson Follett (New York. Hill and W.'mg, ICX;), p 65 All subo;equcnt page rc:fcrc:nc(..'S given III the: tc'Ct arc to rhio; cdltlOl\

250

Diderot: Paradox and Mtmesis

it because the I-narrator confesses in this nlanner to being the First, thus capable only of reporting hi.Ii own thoughts, and also obliged to forgo the reconstruction of the other's discourse-of which, at any rate, he has heard at best only snatches? Nothing, absolutely nothing, allows us to decide. Both versions arc plausible: the first, according to the rules of"verisimilitude" and the conventional logic of narrative; the second, because since the beginning of the dialogue, the author, the text's t."I1unciating subject (nt.-cessarily withdrawn fronl the text, "apocryphal," as Plato would say, lx."Cause we arc dealing with a pure dialogue), has constantly given indications mt.-aJlt to identity him as the First. Or dle inverse. On two occasions, in any case, the First has reminded his interlocutor (anonymous, even ifsome critics have identifk-d him with d'A]embert) that he is the author of Pere de fomille; twice he has referred his interlocutor to his Stdons for further details concerning the "speculative principles" of his aesthetic; and he has not even refrained from designating himsdf by name in reporting by way of anecdote that he once found himself accosted by Sedaine with "Ah! Monsieur Diderot, you arc spk"l1did!" ("Paradox," p. 3+). The author-Diderot-thus occupies two places simultaneously (that is., in the same text). And two incompatible places. He is the First, one of the two interlocutors. Or at least he has presented himself as such. But he is also the one who, putting himself overtly in the position of author or general t."I1unciator, sets himself apart from the First, or is able, if only as a game, to set himself apart from him and to constitute him as a character. It goes without saying that a simple break in the foml of exposition docs not explain this double position, this contradictory double status. The fact that the text passes from a dialogic (or mimetic) mode to a narrative mode (or diagetic-simple or mixt.-d) does not oblige the enunciator of tile first mode-who must then appear, shOJV himself in one manner or another, as again Plato would say, but who could perfectly well continue to identify himself as one of the two speakers-to take that sort of "step back" that leads him to dt..aJ with the two antagonists from an equal distance, in the third person. No formal law can impose or justify such a gesture. Nothing, for example, prohibits the author from openly acknowk-dging his identity when he passes to direct enunciation of the narrative. It would have sufficed to cast the narrative in the first person from its beginning: We went to the theater, but as there were no places to be had we turned off to the Tuilerics . . .

Diderot: Paradox and Mimesis

2S1

We are dealing, then, not widl a plu."Ilomenon of expOsition but with one of enunciation. Moreover, the effect produced is disturbing and dizzying in a way that is certainly differt.-nt fronl that of the dialogue's retum en abyme within the soliloquy, which follows in such a perfectly controlled and virtuoso manner, and which is undoubtt..xily only a consequence (if it is not simply a means of"arrcsring the vertigo"). The intnlSioll of the "I," in other words, far from signitying the author"s appropriation or mastering reappropriation of the text, far from being a 'lsignature'" cftect or the effect of what 1 have elsewhere called autography, 3 represents rather the moment in which the status of the text (the entire book) vacillatt..-s. This is why it unsettlt!s the thesis itself. Who states the paradox? Who is its guarantor? At the same time excluded and included, inside and outside; at the same time himself and the other (or each time, one must suppose., himself as an other-hence the dialogic constraint., even in the monologue). The enwlciating subject occupies in reality no place, he is wlassignable: nothing or no one. A discursive stance [instance J that is unstable and without starus-all the more exterior to the statement for who~e enunciation it is responsible in that it finds itself reimplicated in it and subject to what from that moment can no longer be considered its own enunciation. The author's "apocraphy" here is L'"Ven more fomudable than what Plato feared. One might say that we are simply dealing with the fact of enunciation in gent..Tal. This is quite possible., but it is not specifically what interests me here. I am trying to work at another question, of more limited scope. It would take the following form: Would not this impossible position of the subject or the author be the effect of what he himself (which is to say?) is charged with stating, namely a paradox? Would not a certain logic inherent in the paradox nt.occssarily carry the enWlciarion of any paradox beyond itself, sweep it away in a vertiginous movemt..-nt that would finally t.."Ilgulf, t..-ndlt.-ssly and irrt..mediably, its subject? In other words, would not the enwlciation of a paradox involve, beyond what it has the power to control, a paradox of enunciation?

* What, then, is a 'lparadox"? And what is its logic? Though Diderot, after the fashion of his epoch (and in particularthis is hardly astonishing-of Rousseau), makes abundant usc of the word, he is undoubtedly not the one to whom we should look tor an l. Sl"C! KThc

&:ho of the SUbJl"(.t."

Didcrot: Paradox and Mimesis

25 2

answer, at least not directly. Most of the time, in fact, he follows the received, traditional meaning of the teml. The definition given in the Encyclopedie, as Yvon Belaval has indicated, offers a fairly good model: "It IS a proposition that appears absurd because it contradicts received opinions, but which, nonetheless, is timdcllllt."I1tally true, or is at It.-ast able to take on an air of truth." 4 Yet on another level, Diderot always held another conception of paradox (the classical commentaries have clearly established this point). In referring to the "Reve de d'Alembert," for example, in which one finds, among others, the very thesis of the "Paradox," he speaks of "madness" and "extravagance." Not apologt:tically, but rather in making these the sign or index of the greatest philosophical profundity, of wisdom itself: "It is not possible to be more profound and more mad," he says.s Or again: "This is the greatest extravagance and at the same time the most protound philosophy."6 The paradox is thus not only a contradicting or surprising opinion (out of the ordinary and shocking). It implies a passing to the extreme., a sort of "maximization.," as is said in logic nowadays. It is in reality a hypt.Tbolic movement by which the equivalence of contraries is established (probably without ever establishing itself )-the contraries themselves pushed to the extreme., in principle infinite, of contrarit.-ty. This is why the formula for the paradox is always that of the double superlative: the more mad it is., the more wise it is; the maddest is the wisest. Paradox is defint.-d by the infinite exchange., or the hyperbolic identity., of contraries. Elsewhere., in regard to Holderlin., for whom this will be (whether or not we are dealing here with an influence) 7 the privilegt.xi mode of thinking., particularly in his theory of theater and tragedy, I have proposed to call such paradoxical logic, for convenience, hyperbological. It is not just devious or tornlred., as we see, but properly abyssal-to the .... Cited by Y\,on Bdaval in L'Cftbttrlf"e srms J1IImtf8xe de Diderot (Paris: Gallimard, 194-9), ~.

p. 168.

Cited in Bclaval, L'esti}itiqIlE, p 168.

6 Ibid. 7. Sc:e Ulaptcrs 3 and 4- In

any case, we know from Roland MortIer's tamoll~ work

l)zderot m Allmurg'IC (Pam. Prc!lses UllIverslt:llreS de France, 19~4-), that the manuscript of the "llaradox" had circulated in Gcnnany during the l.\St d~-cade of the eighteenth c:cnnlry (thus, well bctOrc In publlcatton 10 France ill 1820), and thJt It almost certainly passed through the hand"i of Goethe and Schiller. From this point of VIew, It would not he .lbsurd to dunk that something could have reached Hi)lderlin-by means, for example: (one an'K>ng others) of Schiller's long nore Oil rh~ theater III the hrJ.t part of hi~ essay "Grace and Digniry."

Dlderot: PartIIW: and Mimesis

2S3

point of implicating itself in its own definition. And this is probably what explains the fact that nothing is able to stop the hyperbological in this movement by which it coils indefinitely about itself and envelops itself. Nothing can hold it, and in particular no dialt.-ctical operation, despite its strange proximity to spt."Culativc logic (the incessant, or at least regular, alteration of the same, the passage into the oppost.-d or contrary, etc.). The hypcrbological is unceasing, endless. Which also means: without resolution. But these preliminaries aside, with what paradox arc we dealing in "Paradoxe sur Ie comedicn"? Two questions should be distinguished. There is first of all the fact that the very thesis of the "Paradox"-the so-called thesis of the insensibility of the actor, or of the artist in general-is in flagrant contradiction to what is apparaldy one of Didcrot's most constant themes, and in particular to the thesis complacently developed in the second of the "Entretk'1ls sur Ie fils naturel" (another important component of Diderot's dramatic aestht.-rics, along with the "Discours sur la poesie dramatique"). This is the well-known thesis concerning enthusiasm. One wiu remember: "Poets, actors, musicians, painters, singers of the first order, great dancers, tender lovers, the true devout, this whole enthusiastic and passionate troop feels vividly, and does little reflecting."1 The "Paradox," howt.~cr, affirms exactly the opposite: "Grt.'at poets, great actors, and I may add, all great imitators of nature, whoever they may be, beings giftt.-d with fine imagination, with broad judgment, a fine tact, and sure taste, are the least sensitive of all creatures" ("Paradox," pp. 17-18). From here it is a short step to conclude that the paradox (of the (LParadox") is reducible to this contradiction-a step taken, I believe, by most critics, whose major concern appears to be resolving such a contradiction and, for example, reconstitutmg, according to the classical presuppositions of an "organicist" reading (committed to the homogeneityand the finality of a work),. an "aesthetic without paradox."9 I do not at all want to claim that sllch a problem docs not existOr even that one can entirely avoid this kind of reading. But I want to note that there exists also, in itsclt: the thesis of the uParadox"naJllcly the paradox. 8 "Entrettcns sur Ie fils narorcl:' an Didcrot. Ot."",-es, ~d. Andre Bill)' (Pans: Gal· hmard, 19SI), p. 13529 Lacouc-Labanhc·.. Immcc.h.ll'c rcft.'rCnt.c hen: IS Bclaval, /"tstIJitul''' SnJlS pnmdaxe de D"lerot,-Ed,tor

25+

Diderot: Paradax and Mimesis

But in what way is the paradox" in the "Paradox," paradoxical? Is it because it runs up against a prc:vakl1t opinion about actors (and prevalent among actors themselves-fortunately not all of them), contesting basically the old myth of the actor's identification with the charactt.T he plays? Or is it first of all, and more cssL"Iltially, because it obeys this hyperbologic that I have just attempted to describe? We need to take a closer look. How, thL"Il, in the "Paradox," docs the paradox set itself in place? It appears quickly, as early as what one might isolate as the second sequence of the text. The First has indicatL-d his reluctance to state his feelings about a pamphlt.1: by a certain Sticoti, which serves here as a pretext: "Garrick ou les acteurs anglais" (this provides the occasion, moreover., for an "overture" that is also paradoxical; I lack the space to consider it here, but would note that in it we sec the First play at his sdf-Iove and the estt.ocm given to him in a way that follows the most traditional agonistic relation). But he ends finally, under pressure from the St.'Cond, by resolving to speak: the work of Sticoti is a bad work and a useless work: "A great dramatic artist will not be a bit the better, a poor actor not a bit the less inefficient for rLaading it" ('~Para­ dox," p. 12). The dLmonstrarion tht.n begins. It is a first long development (where everything, practically, will have already been said) leading to the following statemt."Ilt, which might be considL-red as one of the two or three major statements of the paradox itself: But the important point on which your author and I arc entirely at variance concerns me qualities above all necessary to a great actor. In my view, he must have a great deal of judgment. He must have in himself an unmoved and disinterested onlooker [one could not be, in fact, more paradoxical, at least in me terms choscn J. He must have, consequently, penerration and no sensibility, the art of imitarihg everything, or, which comes to the same thing, the same aptitude for every sort of character and part. ("Paradox," p. 14)

But this statenlt.'I1t itself is only a conclusion. It draws the consequences from two propositions that appeared in the course of the exposition. The first appeared immediately: "It is nature which bestows personal qualities-appearance, voice, judgment, tact. It is the study of the grt.-at models" the k.nowledge of the hunlan heart, the habit of society, earnest work, experience and acquaintance with the dleater, which perfect the gifts of nan1re" (I.'Paradox," p. 12). The second propo-

DideYot: Paradox and Mimesis

255

sition, a little further on, simply backs up the first with an argument that is properly aesthetic and dramaturgical-or, if one may risk the word, "dramatological": "'How should nature without art make a great actor wht."Il nothing happc.."Ils on the stage as it happt."Ils in nature, and when dramatic pot.ms are aU composed after a fixed system of principles?" ("Paradox," p. 13). What is involvt.-d in this series of propositions? The first statt.-s that if "it is nature which bestows personal qualities," it is study, work, experience, apprentict.oship, the practice of the profession- in short, t.~rything that can be acq uired and that can be ellcompassed by the broadest conception of art-"that pcrft.-cts the gifts ofnamre." It is not too difficult to detect here an echo, however faint, of the Aristotelian definition of mimesis, the relation between art and nature. TIlat is~ an echo of Aristode's fundamt.~tal mimetology, or we should perhaps say his "onto-mimetology"-"Aristotle" being here not the name of a doctrine, but the site of a generative scht."ITla, a matrix, and the index of a historico-theoretical constraint. I am referring, obviously, to the famous passage in the Physics, which Jean Beaufret has appropriately ust.-d to support his analysis of Hoi· derlin's dramatology.lo Aristotle says first (19~) that in general "art imitates nature": he tekhne mimata; ten phusi11. TIlen, a little further on (199a), he spt."Cifies the general relation of mimesis: "On the one hand, techne carries to its t."Ild [accomplishes, pcrft.-cts, epiteletl what phusis is incapable of effecting [lI/JC11Jasasthai); on the other hand, it imitates." There are thus two forms of mimesis. First, a restrictt.-d form, which is the reproduction, the copy, the reduplication of what is given (already worked, dfectt.-d, presented by nature). And this first mt.cming of the term is of course tound in Diderot (as in everyone). In any case it grounds what has been called, perhaps a bit hastily, Diderot)s "naturalism." Then there IS a gent.Tal mimesis, which reproduces nothing given (which thus re-produces nothing at all), but which supplements a certain deficiency in nature, its incapacity to do everything, organize everything, make everything its work-produce everything. II It is a Sec 8c:lUfrcr, "Holdcrlin ct SOphode,... an Holderhn. Rnnarques sur Oed'pe, rt.'mllrlJ"es sl,r A"tigmle (Paris: Union Gena-ale d'&htions, 1963), p.8. II. The English verb "supplemcnr" suggests a compensating for a dc6ClCIl